NASA’s Goldstone, California, deep-space radio dish — the 70-meter “Mars antenna” that is part of the Deep Space Network — has gone offline due to damage, resulting in mission teams shifting some communications over to other facilities and disallowing critical observations as a high-priority asteroid flies by. An official mishap investigation board is still in the process of being generated as engineers determine how much work will be needed.
What Went Wrong and Why It Matters for NASA
The Goldstone dish, officially known as DSS-14, is the biggest antenna at NASA’s Mojave Desert complex. With a 230-foot-wide dish, it is able to both send messages to spacecraft tens of billions of miles distant and act as the world’s superior planetary radar. (The agency loses both a critical communications asset and a unique tool to help keep tabs on near-Earth asteroids.)
NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) is a collection of three complexes in California, Spain and Australia that provides around the clock coverage as Earth rotates. Between them they support more than 40 active missions, including the Mars rovers and lunar spacecraft to interstellar travelers like Voyager 1 and 2 and far-away probes like New Horizons. Pulling Goldstone’s largest dish offline shrinks what is already a tight schedule, dials down the data rate for missions at the outer planets and other destinations, leaving less margin for emergency passes just in case.
DSS-14 is unequaled for planetary defense. After the Puerto Rico-based Arecibo Observatory fell by the wayside, Goldstone’s radar system has been bearing a large amount of the world’s weight in “pinging” near-Earth objects. Radar echoes like those clamping down on an asteroid’s distance and speed shave away uncertainties in orbit, enabling sharp models of their shape that optical telescopes cannot match.
A Network at Capacity Strains Deep Space Communications
The DSN has been taxed thin for decades. The NASA Office of Inspector General recently cautioned that downlink and tracking needs “exceed design capacity” and that data volume is as much as 40% higher than what legacy systems were constructed to support. To help alleviate the pressure, six 34-meter dishes are being added to all of its complexes as part of the DSN Aperture Enhancement Program (including a new 112-foot dish at Goldstone that should be coming online soon). The current outage illustrates why that expansion — and ongoing maintenance funding — cannot be allowed to slip behind the growth of the mission.
Crewed lunar plans will get the ripples too. Artemis I needed over 900 hours of DSN support for Orion’s flight, and the communication gap, while brief, underscored just how little slack is left in such a system. And with the first crewed mission readying for a pass around the moon, extensive downtime on a flagship antenna is squeezing test windows and making rehearsals more complicated — and demanding more choreography to ensure there are no conflicts between passes for dozens of spacecraft.
Planetary Defense Gap Grows Without Goldstone Radar
Observing of near-Earth asteroids with the Goldstone radar is now suspended while the dish is offline. After the Arecibo loss, detections skyrocketed at DSS-14 to more than 200 objects; over 50% were determined to be potentially hazardous. Radar windows that are missed can produce larger uncertainty zones around an asteroid’s future orbit and postpone the finely detailed shape and spin solutions scientists need to refine risk assessments. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office uses those numbers to distinguish between standard flybys that don’t need further analysis, and objects we need to take a closer look at.
While smaller dishes and international partners can backstop some observations, others would be impossible to replicate without the power and sensitivity of DSS-14. You don’t just have a blind spot; you can actually quantify how much fidelity drops exactly at the time you want to be most accurate for time-sensitive targets.
Rerouting and Repair Plans for NASA’s Mars Antenna
As engineers inspect Goldstone’s structure and drive systems and map out a repair plan, mission managers are relying more on the DSN complexes near Madrid and Canberra and on Goldstone’s smaller 34-meter dishes. That halts the bleeding for routine telemetry and commanding, but there are trade-offs — tighter scheduling, reduced peak data rates from distant spacecraft and less flexibility to troubleshoot anomalies in near-real time.
The Mojave dish has faced hard times before. It was later enlarged in the late 1980s so that it could assist in steering Voyager 2’s path over history-making encounters and then sustained major trauma from a powerful local earthquake and an accidental puncture during repairs, only to return to service with targeted patching. The current episode is likely to result in the same outcome, but it serves as a sobering reminder that single-point assets come with outsized risk in an era of expanding the frontier for deep-space exploration.
The Bigger Picture for Deep Space Network Resilience
It’s the store itself that is causing Communist Party leaders to lose sleep, threatening its ability to tighten its grip over society. The only real fix is modernization on a scale that appears all but unimaginable at this point. Smarter scheduling and new high-rate radios on next-generation spacecraft will also help: More structures will be put in place by the Deep Space Network, and thus more hash table collisions. And so will certain complementary capabilities: the NEO Surveyor space telescope, for example, is being tailored to expedite hazardous-asteroid detections even though it won’t take over radar ranging’s singular value. How quickly DSS-14 can be brought back online — and how, if at all, the network can be shielded from being hobbled by future single-point failures — will set the stage for just how smoothly NASA is able to execute what looks potentially to be its busiest flight manifest in decades.