Audio collage begins.
MIKE LEVESQUE
“Follow the Sun.” It’s appropriately named, I think.
SUSANA VILLALBA
The complex is mostly surrounded by mountains. It’s a beautiful country area with a lot of oaks, junipers, and pine trees…
BOB HAROLDSSON
What does it look like? It looks like desert. Lots of desert. Sand and dirt.
RICHARD STEPHENSON
On the way to work, we’re avoiding kangaroos, wombats, emus. As I said, it’s very stereotypical Australia.
Audio collage ends.
NARRATOR
Last season of The Invisible Network podcast, we took a tour of the U.S., visiting ground stations for the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration, or LCRD, one of NASA’s latest demonstrations of high data rate optical communications technologies. This season, we’ll take a tour that’s even grander in scope.
In this episode, we’ll visit personnel at all three Deep Space Network complexes, journeying from a Californian desert, to the mountains of Spain, to an Australian river valley.
But before we leave on our world tour, we have to take a quick stop at the Deep Space Network’s home base: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
MIKE LEVESQUE
My name is Mike Levesque and I’m the DSN Deputy Project Manager.
NARRATOR
From a room with many names, he wishes us “bon voyage.”
MIKE LEVESQUE
We’re at JPL in Pasadena… One of the buildings, we call… the dark room. It’s called, more formally, the Deep Space Operations Center.
It’s also known as a center of the universe…You’ll see a plaque in the center of the room known as the center of the universe. And it really is. All the data that we collect around the universe passes through that building and gets distributed to many of our customers all around the world.
But anyway, we have other sites too… They’re called the Deep Space Communications Complexes, and they’re separated 120 degrees around the globe. And that provides us continuous coverage, or visibility, into space 24/7…
One is in California, called Goldstone, about 70 kilometers or so from Barstow. And one is in Spain, and that’s in Robledo de Chavela. That’s about 65 kilometers from Madrid. We usually call it “Madrid,” though some folks also call it “Robledo.” And then the third site is in Australia in a place called Tidbinbilla. It’s 40 kilometers or so from Canberra. And we often call it “Canberra,” although some of the seasoned guys call it “Tid,” short for “Tidbinbilla.”
NARRATOR
As we covered in the previous episode, the architectural features of these complexes – one large 70-meter antenna and a handful of 34-meter antennas – are largely the same. However, the environmental and cultural differences make each station truly unique.
MIKE LEVESQUE
You go to Australia, and there’s Australians running the station… And you know, of course there’s kangaroos and such.
And in Spain, of course, it’s run by Spanish citizens… and you might see some bulls walking around and grazing around that location.
Then you’ve got… Goldstone, which is out in the high desert… And there’s a lot of burros that that run around on Goldstone from the old gold mining days…
Those locations were originally chosen to be kind of RF isolated, radio frequency isolated. So, they tend to be in valleys and away from population centers.
NARRATOR
At any given moment, these ground stations are tracking spacecraft from Mars to Jupiter to interstellar space. There’s seldom a moment where the network is at rest.
DSN project manager Brad Arnold:
BRAD ARNOLD
We’re a live operation where we have operators physically sitting at consoles managing each track. And we have a system called Follow the Sun, which is probably not too novel for some organizations, but it was for ours a few years ago when we rolled this out.
NARRATOR
Follow the Sun?
MIKE LEVESQUE
Yeah. Follow the Sun. It’s appropriately named, I think.
Originally, we operated these three complexes 24/7… With Follow the Sun, we decided, since they’re 120 degrees apart, the day shift rotates nicely around the globe to each site. So, with Follow the Sun, we chose to change this system so that we could operate only during the daytime at each of those complexes. So that would be dayshift only… so going from 24/7 to 9/7.
BRAD ARNOLD
The complex that is in its daylight working hours is actually managing the tracks for the entire network. So, if it’s daylight in Spain, those operators are actually working the antennas at Goldstone and in Canberra. And as the Earth turns and suddenly it’s daylight in the United States, the Goldstone operators take over and the Madrid operators get to go home…
That actually requires an interface at dusk and dawn in between each of the complexes, where the operators actually do communicate with each other, and they actually hand over the tracks that are occurring at that time. So, there’s a communication that happens – a little dance that occurs when one is going home and the other is getting to work.
NARRATOR
This dance around the globe isn’t purposeless:
MIKE LEVESQUE
One of the challenges we had from NASA was to be more efficient and to reduce costs. And we looked at another number of aspects in the DSN to do that, and one of them was operations.
Operations was a large… fixed cost in the DSN. And we had at the time – when we started the project – about 96 operators worldwide… With Follow the Sun… we reduced from 96 operators to today we have 48 worldwide.
BRAD ARNOLD
It offers improvement in efficiency… Follow the Sun allowed us to have just one set of operators a day shift at each complex, rather than a three shift at each complex. So instead of nine shifts plus extras, now we only have one shift per, or three shifts.
NARRATOR
In a similar spirit of efficiency, we’ll follow the sun on our journey around the globe to each of the Deep Space Network complexes.
The Invisible Network theme.
I’m Danny Baird. This is “The Invisible Network.”
…
A collage of historical audio
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade…
NEIL ARMSTRONG(Apollo 11)
That’s one small step for man…
COMMENTATOR(Voyager Launch)
We have ignition, and we have lift off!
CHILD FROM VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORDS
Hello from the children of planet earth…
COMMENTATOR(Cassini Launch)
Three… two… one… and liftoff, of the Cassini spacecraft…
COMMENTATOR(Perseverance Landing)
Touchdown confirmed, Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars…
Theme music fades.
…
NARRATOR
Our first stop isn’t too far from JPL and the “center of the universe.” It’s just a few hours drive north and east of Pasadena, into the high desert of California.
BOB HAROLDSSON
My name is Robert – I go by Bob – Harroldsson. I am a project manager out here at Goldstone, California… Goldstone is about 35 miles north of Barstow, California, which is in the middle of the Mojave Desert. It’s located on Fort Irwin — the army base… — and it’s the middle of nowhere.
NARRATOR
Bob has played many roles supporting NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program, but most of his time has been with the Deep Space Network in California. One of Bob’s most challenging projects during his long tenure with the Deep Space Network was a significant upgrade to Goldstone’s largest antenna.
BOB HAROLDSSON
I first started in 1983 out at the Goldstone site…
I was a project manager… on a large hydrostatic runner repair. We actually replaced the hydrostatic runner on the 70-meter antenna we have out here. And that task was really exciting to me…
NARRATOR
And what is a “hydrostatic runner?”
BOB HAROLDSSON
A hydrostatic bearing… is a bearing that has liquid that flows between two surfaces. The liquid gets… forced through an orifice and that then separates… the two surfaces. It’s very similar to… an engine that has the oil ports, so that the pistons can move.
And so what it is on the on the 70-meter antenna: it’s a large, 80-foot doughnut… and all the upper structure — the rotating structure — floats on three pads.
The pads are — I’m going to say — about three foot by five foot and they have six orifices each. And this high-pressure oil is forced through the pad, which then lifts up the 18 million pounds of antenna… It floats on 10 thousandths… inches of oil underneath that.
NARRATOR
The Goldstone complex itself is enormous. It’s the biggest of the three DSN complexes in terms of acreage.
BOB HAROLDSSON
What does it look like? It looks like desert. Lots of desert. Sand and dirt.
But the neat thing is that on the way you actually start seeing some of the antennas…
The first sight you’ll actually see are the two Gemini antennas, which are two 34-meter antennas originally built for the army and then given to JPL… One of those antennas is what GAVRT uses to do the science…
NARRATOR
GAVRT is an educational program we’ll talk about more in a later episode. But, back to Bob’s journey to work:
BOB HAROLDSSON
Going up the hill, the first place you get to is called the Echo site. And it has a large “Goldstone…” painted on the hill. So that’s pretty cool…
And from there, if you continue down NASA road another 10 miles or so, there is the Mars site, where you have the 70-meter and a defunct 34-meter. And that’s where the signal processing center is…
NARRATOR
These “defunct” antennas scattered about the complex are ones that have been retired as NASA embraces newer infrastructure and technologies.
BOB HAROLDSSON
So now the signal processing center — we call it SPC-10 — it controls all the local antennas. And since JPL went to what they call “Follow the Sun…” when it’s our daylight, we’re controlling all the antennas around the world. And when it’s our nighttime, Spain or Australia will be controlling our antennas…
NARRATOR
It still takes a small village to keep the station up and running between network controllers at the Signal Processing Center, SPC-10, and all the employees keeping the antennas up and running.
BOB HAROLDSSON
Oh, and then let me get back to this tour! So, between the Echo site and Mars site, if you made a left… then you get into the valley…
Apollo Valley… we still have the 26-meters… And we had the nine-meter… that was used for shuttle and all that kind of stuff back in the day. And in there, you have three antennas… which are beam waveguide antennas.
NARRATOR
In addition to those three beam waveguides – a type of antenna where radio waves are guided from the dish to the receiving equipment – there’s another one under construction which will be operational in a few years. This new 34-meter antenna is part of a DSN expansion around the globe to help keep up with the increasing number of NASA deep space missions.
Goldstone also has a unique capability for radio science.
BOB HAROLDSSON
We have a high-power transmitter… We’ve used it to map the surface of Mars, of Venus.
We can also do asteroids. So, we can actually, when we shoot the radar pulse up and… receive the signal back, we can actually determine the shape of the asteroid, its rotation rate, and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, that’s one of the unique services we do have.
NARRATOR
We’ll talk asteroids in a later episode on DSN radio science. In terms of mission communications support using Goldstone antennas, Bob’s favorite moments on the job involved the support he provided missions during milestone events.
BOB HAROLDSSON
Other real neat things was the entry, descent, and landings of the various Mars landers that we supported. Those “seven minutes of terror” as they called it.
NARRATOR
To close out, I’ll let Bob speak to one of the more seismic challenges he’s faced during his time at Goldstone.
BOB HAROLDSSON
One of the notable things – really big things – that happened was the earthquakes out here at California… The large 70-meter antenna, it was getting ready to acquire a bird, and the shaking tore our sub reflector off of the quad legs. And so that was down for six months as we fixed that.
NARRATOR
To translate the space-talk, the 70-meter antenna was just about to communicate with a spacecraft, when an earthquake tore off the very tip of the antenna, which meant the DSN had to take it out-of-service for six months. Thankfully, the network can rely on coverage from other antennas throughout the network to cover a downed 70-meter, whether that’s due to routine maintenance or rare, unplanned outages due to events like an earthquake.
But what do the engineers at Goldstone do when the ground starts shaking and an earthquake seems imminent?
BOB HAROLDSSON
You just make sure you have all your safety gear, and you do everything safely, and you come back after those kinds of things. And that’s how you deal with them because the work has to be done.
…
NARRATOR
Following the Sun west, our next stop on our tour of Deep Space Network facilities finds us down under with Richard Stevenson and the staff at the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex.
RICHARD STEPHENSON
My name is Richard Stevenson, and I’m an operational supervisor to Canberra’s Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia… My role entails managing 16 controllers at Canberra, and we’ll support all the NASA spacecraft and also agencies that NASA has agreements with as well.
NARRATOR
Like many folks we’ve spoken to this season, Richard’s first big mission was Voyager.
RICHARD STEPHENSON
I was actually recruited in 1988 to support the Voyager 2 Neptune encounter. That was a great one to start off with. And when I first started, it was a case of, “Can it get any better than this?”
…My career has been brilliant. You know, it’s one high point to another high point.
NARRATOR
Richard’s drive to work is just about as easygoing as he is:
RICHARD STEPHENSON
My drive to work is about 22 minutes from home. So, it’s nice and easy. I don’t have any traffic at all, or it’s very rare.
And if you think of the stereotypical countryside for Australia, so we’re driving through a mixture of paddocks and native bush… On the way to work, we’re avoiding kangaroos, wombats, emus. As I said, it’s very stereotypical Australia. And you throw in a couple of feral animals like foxes and rabbits and things to make life more interesting again.
It’s an idyllic drive in… And as you come over the final rise, you see the complex sprawling over the Tidbinbilla Valley. It’s a lovely trip. And so, it’s always nice to arrive.
NARRATOR
Once you’re at the complex, you’ll see many of the same sorts of antennas as there were at Goldstone.
RICHARD STEPHENSON
Canberra has a number of antennas. Probably the most prominent one in the valley is the 70-meter antenna. And then we have three operational 34-beam waveguides…
Canberra differs a little bit from Goldstone. Goldstone is sprawled over a number of valleys with a 20-minute drive between antennas in some cases.
Canberra: we’re all centralized. The operations building is – more or less – in the middle of them. And each antenna is a pleasant lunchtime walk. We actually do sprawl over the Tidbinbilla Valley, but it’s probably no more than a couple of kilometers long.
NARRATOR
Canberra, Tidbinbilla Valley, and the surrounding region have played an important role in space communications since the earliest days of spaceflight.
RICHARD STEPHENSON
Australia has always provided a ground network. And we have a level of expertise – technical expertise – that’s best in the world.
In the 60s… there was actually three NASA tracking stations in and around Canberra. We had the Apollo antenna at Honeysuckle Creek; we had Orroral Valley, which was for near-Earth; and we had Tidbinbilla, which has always been for deep space.
And so, in the 80s, it was all combined to Tidbinbilla. The antenna from Honeysuckle Creek, which was the first man on the Moon antenna, was brought here and continued on its career. The one in Orroral Valley was shut down.
NARRATOR
Today, the support provided by Canberra is similar to that provided by the other two DSN complexes, but its position south of the equator and the ecliptic – the Sun’s apparent path over Earth – does offer something unique to the network:
RICHARD STEPHENSON
We can provide the 70-meter support for things like Voyager, which are right on outside of our solar system now, but also the high bit rates from Mars as well…
Being in the Southern Hemisphere gives us a view of the southern skies that the north doesn’t have… In particular, Voyager 2, after its last encounter with Neptune, went very south of the ecliptic, which took it out of the Northern Hemisphere view and into the Southern Hemisphere. So, we have exclusive rights to Voyager 2… Our 70-meter is the only antenna that can actually command Voyager 2.
…
NARRATOR
Our final stop on our tour of Deep Space Network ground stations is in the mountains of Spain, near Madrid, one of the highest capital cities in Europe.
SUSANA VILLALBA
My name is Susana Villalba, and I am currently working as a link control operator/technical site monitor, here at Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex.
This complex is located in the Northwest of Madrid in a little village called Robledo de Chavela. We are surrounded by mountains…
I live in a little village… close to the station, just 10 minutes from here, and it’s easy for me to get here. But most people live in Madrid.
The complex is mostly surrounded by mountains. It’s a beautiful country area with a lot of oaks, junipers, and pine trees. And it’s also a protected area for birds. And you can see [vultures] and eagles.
If you came from the North, you’d also probably will see El Escorial. That is a beautiful city on the way to the complex. So, it’s nice driving here.
It’s a very dangerous road because you can find sometimes deer or wild boars on the road, so you need to drive careful.
The antennas look impressive… They look like big white dishes. And when people visit them for the first time, they look astonished by its size.
Sometimes you need to compare the size of the big antenna, and we usually tell the visitors that the size of the DSS-63 antenna – that is a 70-meter diameter antenna – is similar to a bull ring – Madrid Bullring – including the seats, the grandstands.
NARRATOR
Susana is keen on the exploration and discovery that results from global collaboration. The Madrid DSN site is one example of the possibilities.
SUSANA VILLALBA
In my opinion, relations and collaborations in space exploration are better and wider than in any other area, and we need to continue this way because space exploration could not be possible without the effort of several agencies and partners. We need to continue this way.
NARRATOR
As for the future, Susana seems most excited for the Artemis missions’ journeys to the Moon as the agency prepares for the longer voyage of sending astronauts to Mars.
SUSANA VILLALBA
I think the best memories are still to come. Because when… man arrives [on] the Moon again, I hope we can continue working here and supporting these missions…
We will be part of the return of the first woman and the next man to the Moon, and later to Mars, if we are lucky enough… I’m very proud of this.
…
The Invisible Network Theme
NARRATOR
That completes our journey around the world with the Deep Space Network. From California to Australia and Spain, we’ve followed the sun through a single day in the life of DSN operations. In our next episode, we’ll transition to how the network provides services to missions.
And remember, no matter the mission, no matter the ground station:
RICHARD STEPHENSON
When you go around the network, there’s so much passion about what we do… It’s only a tiny contribution and it might be insignificant… as far as the bigger picture, but you feel as if you’re still contributing, and that makes it all worthwhile.
Somebody said… “If you if you feel passionate about your job, and you enjoy your job, you never have to work a day in your life.” And here I am, 34 years in my career, and I haven’t worked a day in my life.
Thank you for listening. Do you want to connect with us? The Invisible Network team is collecting questions about NASA’s Deep Space Network from listeners like you! We’re putting together a panel of NASA experts from across the Space Communications and Navigation community to answer your questions.
If you would like to participate, navigate over to NASA SCaN on Twitter or Facebook and ask your question using the hashtag AskSCaN. That’s @ NASA SCaN, N-A-S-A-S-C-A-N, on social media, with the hashtag AskSCaN, A-S-K-S-C-A-N.
This Deep Space Network-focused season of “The Invisible Network” debuted in summer of 2022. Developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the Deep Space Network is managed by JPL with funding and strategic oversight from the Space Communications and Navigation, or SCaN, program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
This podcast is produced by SCaN at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with episodes written and recorded by me, Danny Baird. Editorial support is provided by Katherine Schauer and JPL’s Laurance Fauconnet. Our public affairs officer is Lora Bleacher.
Special thanks to Fall 2021 interns Julia Adde and Nate Thomas, Barbara Adde, SCaN Policy and Strategic Communications director, and all those who have lent their time, talent, and expertise to making “The Invisible Network” a reality. Be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.
For transcripts of episodes, visit NASA.gov/invisible. To learn more about the vital role that space communications plays in NASA’s mission, visit NASA.gov/SCaN. For more NASA podcast offerings, visit NASA.gov/podcasts. There, you can check out “On a Mission,” the official podcast of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.