The NASA website, which provides status updates on each DSN complex, was down on Friday afternoon at its Madrid site, while antennas at locations in California and Australia were communicating with several NASA spacecraft, including Voyager 2 and Juno, which are exploring interstellar space and Jupiter, respectively.
No activity at the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex on Friday afternoon.
Credit: NASA
No activity at the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex on Friday afternoon.
Credit: NASA
“The safety and well-being of our professionals is our highest priority, and our thoughts are with the families and neighbors in the surrounding communities who are experiencing the effects of the wildfires,” NASA said. “We will provide updates as conditions develop.”
A separate deep space tracking station owned and operated by the Spanish government and the European Space Agency has also been evacuated due to wildfires. According to Spanish news. The Cebreros tracking station, part of ESA’s Estrack network, is located a few miles from NASA’s DSN facility.
Reuters reported on Thursday the Spanish authorities ordered More than 19,000 people were evacuated from towns in the mountains west of Madrid. More than 2,000 personnel and 10 aircraft were involved in extinguishing forest fires. A summer heat wave and chronic drought conditions have created conditions for wildfires in Spain and France.
Without the Madrid location, the Deep Space Network is reduced to a single 70-meter radio antenna in Australia. There was a 70-meter antenna in California offline since last year structure as a result of an “over-rotating” accident. The incident damaged cables and water lines and flooded the base of the antenna with 200,000 gallons of water containing glycol, an environmental hazard.
Cleanup and repairs are projected to cost $4.1 million to $4.6 million. NASA officials are combining the repairs with upgrades already planned. The work is expected to keep the antenna offline until 2028.
The good news for DSN is that Artemis’ next mission to the Moon is still at least a few years away. Artemis missions place high demands on the DSN, with additional requirements for telemetry and imaging downlinks to support human spaceflight. Artemis III will now fly in low Earth orbit to test the Orion capsule with commercial lunar landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin. Artemis IV, the program’s first planned lunar landing with astronauts, is targeted no earlier than 2028.
