ET may get a busy signal when phoning home

This past Tuesday at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's Science Committee, officials sounded the alarm on a critical piece of infrastructure called the Deep Space Network (DSN).

The DSN is a worldwide network of ground antennas, located in the US, Spain, and Australia, that supports NASA's interplanetary spacecraft missions. It’s basically the T-Mobile/Verizon for US deep space projects like the Artemis missions to the Moon, the Voyager probes floating in interstellar space, and numerous other endeavors.

• There are currently ~40 missions that rely on the DSN, and another 40+ will join the roster over the next decade or so.

🤔 What’s the problem?... In one word – bandwidth. NASA's inspector general last month found that demand on the network is sometimes exceeding supply by as much as 40%. Which in turn forces the DSN to prioritize certain missions over others – like during Artemis I, where it was turned away from the James Webb Space Telescope.

👀 Looking ahead… Suzanne Dodd, who oversees the DSN in her position at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is calling for additional funding to bolster the network's infrastructure, hire more staff, and bring old antennas back online to meet the increasing demand. The DSN’s annual budget has fallen from $250 million in 2010 to $200 million today, and is projected to continue to decrease through the end of the decade.