During missions featuring robots or humans, each spacecraft relies on a deep-space tracking dish for communication. However, there was never a service in place to rent commercial deep-space antennas, and alternative methods carry a hefty price tag. Thanks to the European Space Agency (ESA) and England’s Cornwall County, a commercial antenna option for space-bound entrepreneurs may become available.
The ESA has a total of three deep-space dishes in Argentina, Spain, and Australia. They all track and communicate with missions including Gaia, ExoMars, and Mars Express.
Recently, the ESA announced its radio dish based in Argentina will undergo a series of high-tech upgrades. The two-year improvement process will include a new main signal-processing system, and a 26 GHz downlink, which will support a high-speed data receipt from space.
“This means our station at Malargüe will be able to download data from ESA’s future Euclid mission, for example, at 75 Mbit/s, many times faster than today,” says Michel Dugast, ESA’s station engineer and project manager for the upgrade.
The ESA has no plans of slowing down, and the data flow and improved instruments will continue to grow. Due to this expansion, ESA engineers plan to re-develop a portion of the Goonhilly Earth Station for commercial deep-space tracking services.
“Upgrading Goonhilly and building up a commercial capability to support future exploration missions is good for ESA and good for European science and industry,” says Rolf Densing, ESA’s Director of Operations.
The existing dish, measuring 32 m in diameter, will be fashioned with fast data links suited for far off missions, normally surpassing 2 million km away.
“Once the station upgrade work is complete, in about 24 months, Goonhilly will be able to complement ESA’s own stations, and provide deep-space tracking for the Agency’s missions as well as those of other space agencies or from private space start-ups aiming to exploit the Moon or mine asteroids,” says Klaus-Jürgen Schulz, responsible for ESA ground station engineering.
Built in 1962 in Cornwall, UK, Goonhilly once held the title of the largest satellite in the world. It has more than 60 dishes, and is known throughout the UK for providing iconic TV images to many viewers.
Filed Under: Aerospace + defense
