Two major NASA missions in the past year have shown a communications weakness.
The Deep Space Network is a collection of 14 antennas located in California, Spain and Australia and is used by NASA to communicate with its distant space probes. Ensuring that every mission beyond Earth has the communications time it needs can be difficult because of the network's busyness.
The Deep Space Network was going to be fully taken by Artemis because they needed to keep track of the spaceship, according toMercedes Lpez-Morales.
There are amazing views of NASA's moon rocket debut.
The launch of Artemis 1 took place on November 16. A test flight to kick off the agency's return to the moon is scheduled to take place in 25 days.
The James Webb Space Telescope and other missions have been put in the back of the car because of the constant contact with the Deep Space Network. The Deep Space Network would be strained by Artemis, so the agency added two new antennas in January and March of next year.
Communication time is hard to come by. Lpez-Morales said she was told before Artemis 1's launch that it could be up to 80 hours without contact.
She told the board that frequent communications with the observatory doesn't affect its instructions. The telescope needs to be able to beam its data before its computer runs out.
You can't download data for that long.
The Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland rearranged the observing schedule for Artemis 1. Scientists prioritized shorter observations, which created smaller batches of data, to reduce the chance of the telescope's computer filling up before the Deep Space Network can accept the next batches of data.
Scientists want a different solution to the communications log jam because NASA plans more Artemis launches.
Lpez-Morales asked NASA to come up with a plan to have more access to antenna.
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