GAO: The DSN is actually falling apart Options

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/abstract.php?rptno=GAO-06-445

[djellison]

Truth be told, I could go even further and say that the generosity with which DSN facilities have been made available to ESA could justify in some way a contribution from those nations...of course it's very give and take with things like this - you scratch our back..we'll scratch yours etc.

One thing that I've thought of...there was a detailed breakdown of estimated DSN costs for missions in the recent as a function of number of contacts per week, length of contacts, and facility size required etc in available in the library of the current Discovery AO
http://discovery.larc.nasa.gov/PDF_FILES/N...S-Update061.pdf

I'm not sure how the funding for a facility like this works - but I presume it's income is both from funding on a mission by mission basis as outlined in that doc, and also general DSN funding from NASA that's for maintainance and upgrades as opposed to normal running costs.

Perhaps one or the other needs a bit of a hike.

Doug

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Truth be told, I could go even further and say that the generosity with which DSN facilities have been made available to ESA could justify in some way a contribution from those nations...of course it's very give and take with things like this - you scratch our back..we'll scratch yours etc.

...

Doug

Added later (previous reply by Doug added during editing my own)

Of course, Doug, whatever the ownership and leadership of the DSN, users will have to contribute in a way or another. There is no reason (save pure generosity) that the US pay for others. This contribution can take the form of a rent, or new facilities added. But if other countries contribute with new facilities, they will sooner or later claim some leadership. And there are only two solutions:
-an international organism managed by contributor countries
-a UN organism.
That makes little difference though, except that some politicians in the US don't like the UN.

I also wouldn't be surprised if at some point after that happened that "Europe, or others" would, say, issue ESA-like press releases claiming they built the first deep space network.

I don't know to what you allude to, but I agree it would not be honest. US clearly has at least forty years in advance. Only the Russians could say they have some kind of DSN, but it was made only of ships able to receive only communications from low orbit, and some large antennas on their territory, not a network all around the world able to receive signals from mars or beyond.



This discution is becoming quick and interesting, but I don't have a DSN for me and here in France it is time to shut down my station. Bye, to the next communication window.

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Only the Russians could say they have some kind of DSN, but it was made only of ships able to receive only communications from low orbit, and some large antennas on their territory, not a network all around the world able to receive signals from mars or beyond.

Russia has had a serious DSN since 1960, with a higher interplanetary bandwidth than the US, before the construction of the 64-meter Mars antenna at Goldstone. The Western center was in the Crimea, and the Eastern center was in Ussuriysk, and a couple big radio telescopes that also seconded at telemetry receivers near Moscow.

The Pluton system was the first component, built in 1960 near Yevpatoria. It consisted of three antennas, each of which was an array of 8 dishes on a common mount. It transmitted and received PCM coded data on decimeter and centimeter bands, and it could receive orthogonal coded (PPM) signals on a centimeter band. They also built a 32-meter dish just prior to that in Simferopol', to be used for lunar missions.

[attachment=5886:attachment] [attachment=5890:attachment]
(Pluton receiver site and transmitter site)

In the mid 1960s, a new system was constructed called Saturn, designed for the manned Moon program, but also purposed for interplanetary communication. It consisted of a great number of 25- and 32-meter antennas at a number of sites throughout the Soviet Union. The two 25-meter antennas seen in the upper right above are part of that system. Pluton was also upgraded, and began to use biorthogonal coding. They could send telemetry reliably at 400 bits/sec by then, and images at up to 6144 bits/sec.

[attachment=5891:attachment] [attachment=5892:attachment]
(70-meter installation, 64-meter antenna at Bear Lake)

In the early 1970s, a 70-meter antenna was built in the Crimea, and a second built in the Eastern center in Siberia. At the time, they were the largest steerable parabolic antennas in the world (Goldstone later upgraded its 64-meter DSN to 70 meters, with extensions to the dishes). This system, called Kvant ("quantum"), was used for Venera-13 and later missions. It's still in use today, and has been upgraded to be essentially identical to the American system. The two Russian 70-meter dishes, and the three American ones have been used together a few times, like during the Vega mission.