After nearly breaking up, NASA’s Deep Space Network “worked well” on Artemis II

“As soon as that happens, as we move forward with new commitments, we’ll be more focused, I think, on whether or not we’re ready to commit to new projects,” Heckler said.

A private antenna on the Internet

One setback for DSN is an accident last year that knocked out one of the 70-meter (230-foot) Internet antennas at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California. This antenna, along with similar ones in Spain and Australia, is used to communicate with NASA’s long-distance missions.

The 70-meter dish was following NASA’s Juno spacecraft to Jupiter last September when it “spinned hard” and damaged cables and water lines in the fire suppression system. About 200,000 liters of water flooded under the antennas. The water contained glycol, which makes it known as an environmental hazard, officials said wrote in the report after investigating the accident. The flood caused the antenna to become inoperable.

Researchers cited a number of technical and policy reasons. After solving the problem with an emergency shutdown of the antennas, Goldstone engineers “went through and bypassed a number of security measures that would normally have prevented the circuit,” officials wrote in the report.

“The investigation revealed inadequate training, inadequate documentation procedures, reliance on systems that lack track records and confidential information, and errors in the management of antennas,” officials wrote. “In addition to the reasons mentioned above, the hydraulic limit system – the last failure to be protected against excessive rotation – was found to be damaged to the point of inoperability in an unknown and undocumented event.”

Service records indicated that the hydraulic limit system was last tested in 2004.

NASA officials estimate that it will cost between $4.1 million and $4.6 million to repair and restore the antenna to service. “Our plan for the system is to combine any post-disaster repairs with a pre-planning plan that will keep the system running until 2028,” Heckler said.