The Monitoring Station in the Madrid town of Robledo de Chavela has a new antenna, the sixth operational, to support the communications of interplanetary spacecraft. Specifically, this new NASA 'ear', 34 meters in diameter, will guarantee contact with a good number of missions to Mars. In addition, it will serve as support for the rest of the antennas, overloaded by the unstoppable increase in traffic in space. The infrastructure was inaugurated this Wednesday by King Felipe VI.
The Robledo station, from where the historic first passage on the Moon was followed in 1969, has been part of NASA's Deep Space Network since 1964 along with two other facilities located in Goldstone (California) and Canberra (Australia). Their strategic distribution, separated from each other by about 120 degrees of longitude, allows that when one of them begins to lose the signal of a spacecraft, another captures it immediately.
The new antenna, called DSS53, has been in operation since February 25. It has a diameter of 34 meters, weighs about 400 tons and its disk is made up of a mosaic of 348 panels. The total duration of its construction has been four and a half years, including the period of one year for the electronic installation - carried out for the first time from start to finish by a Spanish team - and the subsequent tests. Unlike older antennas, most of its electronic equipment is located in a type of basement, which makes it easier to maintain.
It can transmit in X-band (about 8 gigahertz) and receive in X-band and Ka-band (32 gigahertz). This makes it impossible to directly follow the future missions of the Artemis program to return to the Moon, which operate in S and Ka2 band, for which the DSS56 antenna, physically twin of the 53, which began operating in Robledo last year, is prepared. . Yes, it will be able to continue other lunar missions.
From Jupiter to the Sun
On the other hand, DSS53 "will be very important for monitoring missions to Mars," says Raúl Alonso, supervisor of signal processing equipment at the station. "In addition, it will relieve the rest of the antennas of work," he adds. Among these missions are three Martian orbiters: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) from NASA, and Mars Express, from the European Space Agency (ESA), to reconnoiter the terrain of the red planet, and Maven, from NASA, to study its terrain. atmosphere. In addition, the antenna is also attentive to other interplanetary missions such as Juno, which studies the planet Jupiter; Dart, destined to crash into an asteroid and divert its trajectory as a technological test; or the Parker Probe Solar probe to study the Sun. That's how far you can go from Robledo de Chavela.
The missions served by the new antenna:
-MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), launched in August 2005: Mission to orbit Mars and increase knowledge of its surface for future projects.
-MAVEN, launched in November 2013: Mission intended to orbit Mars to study the Martian atmosphere
-MEX (Mars Express), launched in June 2003: Mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) destined to orbit Mars for the study of its surface, atmosphere and environment of the planet
-JUNO, launched in August 2011: Mission dedicated to the study of the planet Jupiter.
-OSIRIS-REx, launched in November 2016: Mission to collect rock samples on the nearby asteroid Bennu and bring them to Earth.
-DART, launched in November 2021: Mission aimed at colliding with an asteroid and diverting its trajectory (test of technology to protect the Earth from a potential dangerous asteroid).
-LUCY, launched in October 2021: Mission aimed at investigating asteroids.
-STEREO, launched in October 2006: Observatory of the Sun for the study of its structure and evolution of solar storms.
-SPP (Solar Parker Probe), launched in 2018: Mission to make observations in the outer corona of the Sun to study the plasma, magnetic field and energy flows that produce heat and solar winds.