NASA officials sound alarm over future of the Deep Space Network | Hacker News Reader

NASA officials sound alarm over future of the Deep Space Network

arstechnica.com

214 pointsbpierre134 comments

> We're not going to have bits of data. We're going to have gigabits of data," said Philip Baldwin, acting director of the network services division at JPL. "I don't want 1080p for video resolution. I want 8K video."

Is this a reason why India's moon craft had such low resolution images? I checked and the rover only has 2x 1 megapixel cameras for some 3d stuff. The pictures from the lander were the usual low res generic stuff we've always gotten.

Why cant they put a 4k lense on these things? That has to have scientific value even for looking at their own rovers/landers for defects.

The limit seems to be not the cameras, but the downlink.

You can trade off resolution for time, though. Surely high resolution photos would be useful for some purposes, even if it means you only get a few of them in a day.

Seems like even that would come at the cost of other data that may be more critical (sensors, telemetry, etc).

But if the network is as a whole pushing full capacity, spreading out the load won't help because there's barely any slack to spread it into. You could get 4x resolution, but you'll only get 1/4th the amount of footage.

Let's face it, we don't really need 24fps+ footage from the moon. Nothing is changing on a timescale that would be interesting. Even if the cameras are on a rover, take high quality panoramic 360 stereoscopic images every time the rover moves to a new destination. During the course of the next move, it can be uploading that data.

But who are we kidding? A group of internet forum nerds coming up with something that the people at NASA/JPL/ESA/etc haven't already considered?

> Let's face it, we don't really need 24fps+ footage from the moon. Nothing is changing on a timescale that would be interesting.

NASA's funding problems would compound if they took an attitude this naïve during what is largely a PR mission.

I'm naive? What do you expect to see? Just take a still and apply some noise to it, and it'll look "just like" video. I don't know what you're on about, but there's no people in these images. If these were manned landings with expeditions, then great, let's have some video. But that's not what we're talking about. And you know this

There are plans to send people back to the moon.

I think they're pushing for funding to upgrade the bandwidth. More channels, more data we can get at once.

I always wondered the same thing. But my theory wasn’t bandwidth, it was power, cost and (perhaps) weight.

I had no idea that we still monitored these things from the ground.

The power/weight thing is largely solved thanks to cell phones.

But they probably can't just buy it from industry, it has to be custom made for the project, with some gov-heavy regulation no doubt.

But surely they could do far better than 1 megapixel.

So you take the miniaturization gains from cell phones, and then replace the size/weight by encasing it within a sphere of water to protect it.

do you think the wavelengths used by phones are going to work through space and the atmosphere, are they focused on short length transmissions (higher freqs). The answer appears to be yes ;-)

wavelength is just a requirement for an antenna which doesn't need to be shielded. i wasn't specifically saying use COTS phone chipsets, but the fact that the miniaturization is now possible. however, the little helicopter on Mars running Snapdragon chip (irc?) shows that COTS is possible

The helicopter has a Snapdragon, and then IIRC one of the experiments on the rover has two Intel Atoms, plus using ethernet to talk to the cameras.

You'll need a ton (well, probably several tons) of water.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1336/what-thicknes...

^^ Interesting read on this very topic.

Lots of space stuff is 10-20 years behind what we use on the ground because of radiation hardening. Both because volume is so low that radiation hardened electronics have a very slow update schedule, and because older technology is inherently more radiation tolerant (higher voltages, larger process nodes, etc).

The ISS has off-the-shelf notebooks, but apart from that the uptake of regular non-hardened hardware is relatively recent and quite slow. I think the Falcon 9 has a couple non-hardened systems, and of course Ingenuity has lots of regular off-the-shelf hardware. That was one of the big reasons the predicted lifespan of Ingenuity was so low, but software mitigations (like the ability to reboot mid-flight) have proven very effective.

Our connectivity to mars is on the order of 12kbps, presumably better for the moon.

My other question would be whether this is due to the need to radiation harden stuff? We were developing for what effectively was equivalent to an arduino in terms of processing power due to the need for radiation hardening (and other legacy / slow moving reasons).

> Our connectivity to mars is on the order of 12kbps

It depends on the spacecraft. DSN is currently talking with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at 1 Mbit/s (https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html, select MRO, click "more detail" in the bottom-left).

Wow, >46 minutes latency. IDK what I expected.

It's not bad seeing as Mars is 225 million to 401 million Km away depending on where it is in its orbit.

46 Light Minutes is pretty much the maximum, that's 827,427,184 Kilometers round trip which is a bit beyond the maximum distance to Mars so there's some processing delays thrown in there.

We can't really get rid of the latency but we can increase the bandwidth by throwing a bunch of higher-power communication satellites on Mars.

We can certainly push more data from Mars, but the entire point of the article is that we probably won't have the bandwidth to receive it.

Unless we can convince congress and NASA execs to increase the budget and get more dishes built pronto.

Yep. We could cover Mar's sky with something similar to SpaceX's Starlink (high availability from any location on Mars) but with large data buffers and transmission systems that can pump the goods all the back to Earth.

Three geostationary satellites should do fine for the number of data consumers on Mars.

Except for anything at the pole.

But the problem remains the link from Mars to earth, not from the surface to orbit.

s/geostationary/areostationary

Nah I don't want to. "Geo" is used generically often enough and I'd rather use a generic term than a mars-specific term.

NAME Voyager 2

RANGE 20.00 billion km

ROUND-TRIP LIGHT TIME 1.54 days

DATA RATE 160.0 b/sec

Amazing.

> whether this is due to the need to radiation harden stuff?

It's been a very long time since I read about it so I cannot provide my source but yes that is likely part of it. There's also the resilience of the components to trauma to consider.

One of the key techniques for radiation hardening is big transistor geometries. Big transistors are less susceptiple to SEU (single event upset) caused by cosmic rays [0].

Unfortunately big transistors are old transistors. Modern 7 nm geometries are much too small to be rad-hard. Rad-hardness needs big 20-year-old geometries or even older. That also implies slower clock speeds.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset

Surely redundant transistors would also be a useful technique. E.g. have an array of transistors at the current geometry, all doing the same function. The chance of a single event upsetting them all becomes unlikely.

Yes, the strategy IIRC SpaceX's Dragon uses is to have 3 more modern CPUs tied together, such that they're all running the same operation and checking each other. It mitigates errors without as much of a performance penalty.

That doesn't make sense. Even if the speed is low right now, I don't see why you'd gimp the hardware. You can take higher res pictures and transfer them over longer periods of time.

While in the article said "8k video", I suspect he meant 8k live streaming. Which means right now or lose it forever. You can do hybrid if you want. Local cache on hardware that records on 8k, and streams live to 1k, so bandwidth is not exceeded.

You might run out of local disk space while waiting for whatever is there to transfer. Assuming you are continuing to take more pictures/videos and want to save them until they can be transferred.

I think disk space is cheap as well.

Radiation hard electronics are not.

And you don't have to send everything high quality. But at least some shiny pictures would be nice.

I don't buy that when you can buy 32gb of storage on a card the size of your pinkie nail for under $10.

Sure but what does it cost for 32gb of space rated, radiation hardened memory?

Maybe even in triplicate for a consensus system!

I've got a quote in front of me right now for a ~1 TB data recorder for just shy of $4 million.

Also keep in mind this isn't even for the highest class parts, this is more in line for something like a NASA Explorers program level [0]. Something you would get for a JWST or an Artemis level of program would be even more $$$

https://explorers.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html

That card would be dead (non responsive or short circuited) by the time it made it to Mars. Rough rule of thumb I have heard is add 2 zeros to the cost of every IC for space grade stuff.

You're forgetting just how inhospitable space is to consumer grade electronics. If you watch non-live videos from the space station or check out some of their pictures you'll see loads of dead or stuck pixels on the cameras. That's from radiation damaging the components and those are essentially still completely protected by Earth's magnetic field. As you venture beyond LEO the situation gets much worse and an unlucky hit could kill your $10 storage ending your $74 million dollar Moon mission.

I'm not, I assume anything like that will need to be wrapped in sheets of lead. But modern storage densities are so high there's no need to run out.

Lead wrapping thick enough to sufficiently protect against radiation damage is very, very heavy. Beyond LEO, excessive weight is still ridiculously expensive.

My point being that it's the hardening that's expensive, not the storage itself. I don't think you need that much lead to shield increasingly tiny storage media.

Chandrayaan-3's life expectancy is 2 weeks. You could probably say the same thing about every aspect.

And how reliable will that storage be when it is bombarded with all of the radiation out atmosphere is currently shielding it from

Hardware has to withstand the elements, including the radiation. On Earth we have the atmosphere to absorb a substantial amount compared to on Mars and the Moon.

A big problem with computing in space is the radiation environment. To be quite frank, it's absurdly hostile. IIRC the voyagers have very little computing power (so, few things that can malfunction) and even then they run three processors that are already radiation-hardened, and each computation is run in parallel on each processor, and the outcomes are compared among the three to detect and throw away any computations that were altered by radiation-based bit flips.

Such is space. Everything needs to be designed specially for it, especially for trips beyond LEO (where the magnetosphere is still providing you significant protection).

The problem with newer sensors and such is that they're not designed to handle the stress of going into space as well withstanding the greatly increased radiation exposure on Mars and the Moon. The missions to send stuff up into space is already expensive and so you'll have to reduce the chances of the gear you're sending up of failing. Unless you can afford to keep making trips to Mars until you get something there that works and then stays working long enough to do viable work.

That seems so counter productive

The experimental helicopter on Mars might start to change the equation though -- it's built with many commercial grade components, instead of fancier things, and has worked well above expectations. The CPU is just a regular Snapdragon, like in phones.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-designed-perseverance-helicop...

> Why cant they put a 4k lense on these things

Bigger focal plane means more power, more data processing/storage means more power. More power means more solar arrays/batteries. More solar arrays/batteries means more mass. More mass means larger actuators to move it around. Larger actuators means more power...all of the above means more money.

I can't give a specific reason why, but there are likely cascading effects and system impacts to the mission. Its not like larger space rated focal planes, larger data storage and high powered amplifiers to get more data down don't exist. But at some point you do just have to call it "good enough" or "meets requirements" to avoid the system spiraling out of control.

4K cameras are tiny, and you could only turn them on for a brief moment to take a picture.

It's all about bandwidth. Pictures are nice but command and control are vital, so more bandwidth is given over to that.

The bandwidth depends upon the power levels, antenna size, signal strength and the noise level. See the Shannon-Hartley theorem for details.

This means from a small lander on the moon all the way back to earth the bandwidth is small. Sure put a big camera on there, but it'll take weeks to send one picture in its entirety. The Indian lander only has like 2 weeks of life total.

Sure but I would assume they would eventually have some type of relay, like lunar gateway. Allow the landers to sip power and send to the relay, probably more a series of satellites in more eccentric orbits, and let those use their bigger solar panels and higher power to transmit/recieve back to ground stations.

I mean, how would we communicate with Mars colonies when the earth and mars are at opposite sides of the sun without some series of satellites in a elliptical orbit possibly at angle perpendicular to our general orbital planes?

I don't understand why one of the first priorities for NASA and the moon isn't a satellite communications systems designed for the moon.

I truly believe that NASA would fare much better if they focused on regulation, deep space research, and communication. They already do the first 2, but for some reason, they neglect communication.

They build these fantastic probes, but then don't build out a communication network. This *despite the fact that they have people like Vint Cerf at their disposal !! This just boggles my mind.

Once they build out for the moon, they could have a blueprint for deep space, while still being easy enough to iterate on designs (the moon being a much closer and easier to reach target, thereby reducing the development/test/feedback loop, as they wouldn't have to wait 6+ months for travel time.

It is one of their priorities.

https://tempo.gsfc.nasa.gov/projects/LCRNS?tab=overview

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Lunar_Mission_Suppo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LunaNet

The first two words of your NASA link are "In 2022.." they established it.

NASA started way after artemis, which strongly suggests this is an afterthought. The documents are design and planning of the architecture, - nowhere near rollout.

Further, STMD doesn't even mention anything close to communications on it's home page (correct me if I missed it). It's also not listed on their Spacetech page [0]. Also, teh LNSS project only goes so far as a demonstration scheduled for 2028 that will test whether they can pick up earth-GPS signals on the moon. [1]

Communications is essential to growing work outside of earth orbit. Nowhere do I see that NASA has this as a "priority".

Now, it's possible that NASA has 1,000 priorities, but that just means they have none.

I appreciate the ESA link - glad to see they are doing something about this, but I was referring to the article about NASA and NASA priorities. I get that we share things, but really, there is nothing significantly there regarding NASA.

[0] - https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/programs [1] - https://www.gps.gov/cgsic/meetings/2022/murata.pdf

It's a priority for NASA, but it isn't a priority for the snakes in Congress, who don't really care about anything beyond their approaching graves and thus only see NASA as a jobs program.

Satellite communications systems aren't as easy of a jobs program as giant outdated rockets, thus they'll only allocate funding to SLS at the cost of everything else.

I respectfully disagree (well, ok, Congress sucks, sure). But NASA has too many priorities (which means they really have none).

If they can't make space-internet sexy, then they should hire a marketing firm. Heck, insurance companies (insurance!!!) are able to raise millions from VC firms, then space-internet should be able to raise something from Congress.

My belief is that it's not really important to NASA, and they aren't really trying to sell it to congress. My bet at this point is that the Chinese have internet access on the moon before we do (albeit they're firewalled version).

I think you're misunderstanding something, the DSN isn't space-internet.

It's the system needed to talk to specifically deep space satellites and space probes. It's the thing talking to the Voyager probes all the way out past the heliosphere. It has trouble raising funding because it has to be spread around the world and thus doesn't result in as many jobs across different states.

Such a system doesn't really have commercial value (yet) because there aren't really any deep space privately operated probes. Privately owned things are close enough that they can either talk directly to the ground using their own much smaller base stations, or hitchhike on other networks (eg TDRSS, geostationary relay sats or Starlink).

The problem is also especially bad with these small satellites. The big crewed vehicles would be less problematic since they can have larger more powerful transmitters, which therefore won't require as much DSN attention.

I understand exactly what it is - I was simply trying to show that NASA has no game plan for this. Their plan is basically to have everything beam back to earth across these dishes (I know, I'm probably simplifying too much here).

If there were a long term plan (which I simplistically termed "space internet"), then there would be a way to address this. Instead, it appears as if they are trying to keep old equipment going rather than investing in a new, upgraded communication system that could be leveraged not only by future missions, but also added to by private companies in the future.

Congress would much prefer that NASA ask for money to fund a new system that creates new technologies than just fund old dilapidated tech. That's the issue, and NASA doesn't seem to get it. Is it dumb? Sure. But that's politics, and as a government entity (my personal favorite, in fact) they just aren't doing a good job here.

One last thought...I envision 100 years into the future that there are communication nodes all over the place, such as a big transmit/receive array physically on the moon, at various lagrange points across the solar system, all based on lasers, quantum tech, or whatever the futuristic long-term thing needs to be. Frankly, my concern is that we'll still be doing the same old thing 100 years from now. And while you may scoff at that (and I hope you're right!), remember that NASA does not currently have the technology to do something we last did 50 years ago (put a man on the moon). So I think those fears of a stale and stagnant NASA not knowing how to move forward are at least somewhat valid (even if I can't express it as well as I'd like).

> Congress would much prefer that NASA ask for money to fund a new system that creates new technologies than just fund old dilapidated tech. That's the issue, and NASA doesn't seem to get it. Is it dumb? Sure. But that's politics, and as a government entity (my personal favorite, in fact) they just aren't doing a good job here.

Where are you getting all this? Surely not from this little Ars Technica article.

> Once they build out for the moon, they could have a blueprint for deep space

It's the other way around, actually. JPL and others, including Vint Cerf, have been working on the blueprint for a couple of decades, and the spacecraft in orbit around Mars have been acting as relays for the landers (e.g., Perseverence) for years. It's a question of bringing something similar to the Moon.

Fair point on design - I was thinking more of implementation, and should have worded it more clearly.

I think you over-simplify the challenge.

Satellites have limited lifespans. You can build them bigger, better, stronger, to last longer, but inevitably they break down and cannot be serviced. One micrometeorite in the wrong place, and the entire investment is gone. Even the day to day wear and tear from the radiation of space slowly breaks them down.

What's more, they can't change orbit once launched. If you lose one, you can't reposition another to make up the difference. It's just a gap, so you need high redundancy.

You would need very well-built satellites (expensive) with high powered transmitters (expensive because they need lots of power/solar panels) in a large network (lots of them) to provide high redundancy. They'd also each need to be launched with an expensive rocket (maybe when Starship is operating?).

The DSN using dishes on the ground on earth is the cheaper option, because you can fix things that break. It's maintainable with a low ongoing cost instead of a super high up-front cost.

I agree with everything you say. However, as we move beyond near-earth space, we will need better communications systems. The moon provides an ability to work out things like replacing/repairing/ decommissioning a satellite beyond earth's orbit but much easier & quicker to get to than anywhere else in the solar system.

Also, satellites can last a long time. There are GPS satellites that are a quarter of a century old and still functioning [0]. I didn't check about other satellites, but I'm sure there are older ones.

If we are to become a space-faring species, then we will need to learn how to do this. Original sea-faring peoples did this millenia ago, and today we ship all sorts of things to every corner of the globe.

Building a shared communication infrastructure is a logical next step. Otherwise we are going to build oversized devices with larger batteries almost like making a walkie-talkie trying to communicate between countries - it's not a good approach. Build out the infrastructure and then the devices (probes/satellites/spacecraft/etc) can leverage the shared infrastructure.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_satellite_blocks

For near-earth communications, I don't see why they can not use the SpaceX network or similar instead. Tracking these tiny CubeSats with only 3 DSN dishes are insane! DSN should really work for deep-space missions only.

I believe that NASA recognized the problem and potential solutions, but they moved slowly probably due to their clunky bureaucracy.

> NASA relies on commercial ground stations for more than half of its ground station support for the agency's satellites in low-Earth orbit. NASA last year selected SpaceX, Amazon, Viasat, Telecast, SES, and Inmarsat to begin developing commercial capabilities to replace the government-owned Tracking and Data Relay Satellite network, which is used for near-continuous connectivity with the International Space Station and other satellites closer to Earth.

Those CubeSats were a deep-space mission. Out near the Moon.

The TDRSS is separate from DSN. Expanding low-orbit options won't do anything to help here.

I didn’t realize Cubesats could go that far. That’s really great.

CubeSats have gone all the way to Mars even

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Cube_One

Cubesats have been out as far as Mars. There were two which hitched a ride along Perseverance and deployed prior to Mars entry to serve as relays and collect data on the entry, descent and landing phases of the mission.

Ukraine has been having trouble with the Starlink because Putin & Musk are pals. It isn't safe for our country to depend on someone that flaky.

Any evidence to back up that claim?

Ukraine has been having issues because bills weren't paid in full

TL;DR the quantity is killing the quality. There are so many small cubesat-style missions that we're actually losing communications time with James Webb to keep track of them all. And Artemis is going to swamp everything with downlink data rates.

I worked at JPL, sometimes with the folks mentioned in this article. I suspect this is a money problem, not a technology problem. IIRC, everyone knows optical (laser) comms are going to carry a lot more load, and the DSN build-out plan already specs more ground-stations with smaller radii (better for closer tracking) vs larger dishes (better for voyager / juno style missions). There's also been commercial support (e.g., Amazon[1])

These folks know how to do it effectively and efficiently (and cheaply) just need the resources and permission.

1. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/amazon-launches-a...

The Psyche mission launching in October (to the asteroid of the same name) will include a laser-based communication system technology demonstration, the first beyond the Moon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Optical_Communicati...

And here on Earth there's a new DSN antenna currently under construction at Goldstone (California) that will be capable of handling both radio and optical signals.

https://www.peraton.com/news/meet-dss-23-the-112-foot-wide-a...

So nothing operational yet, but stuff is happening.

This is ridiculous from NASA point of view :-( They're shooting their self in the foot.

They should fund the DSN and make sure that not only all antennas are operational, but build new ones at the 3 locations or even better create additional locations.

A strike from DSN personnel would teach NASA to spend some money on dish antennas. It's insane to "throw" hundred of billions of USD for Artemis and not invest 1 billion for the comms infrastructure.

I guess it won't be long until a "genius" manager comes up with the idea of DSNaaS (Deep Space Network as a Service) :-)

Bonus link, live console/status of the DSN: https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

> It's insane to "throw" hundred of billions of USD for Artemis and not invest 1 billion for the comms infrastructure.

Perhaps, but that's largely not in NASA's control; Congress appropriates money for specific purposes. NASA can't legally go grab Artemis money and shift it over to DSN.

I agree, but perhaps they should've included in the Artemis budget a small item for comms investment/modernization. Or even better spread out the DSN cost in all missions (JWST, Orion...) and also ask partners like ESA and JAXA to help cover the costs.

I fear that as soon as something becomes this controlled by politics, reasonable project decisions take the backseat to political concerns, no matter what any participant's motivations and reasoning is.

They might have tried attaching this to Artemis, as you suggest, but gotten political pushback. They might have known that they can get Artemis approved without the DSN improvement and then hold Artemis hostage for DSN improvements. DSN money might have ended in the wrong Congress person's district. So many possible political reasons we might never know

The DSN has facilities located around the globe which is most definitely not in Congressional districts, so it's not capable of being a jobs program. That might help explain why it gets such little attention.

Call your Congressperson. Ask them to support an appropriation specifically for Nasa's DSN. It only takes 5-10 minutes.

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

"Hello, my name is $name. I am asking you to either sponsor legislation or to support legislation sponsored by another memeber of Congress to increase funding for NASA's Deep Space Network to an appropriate level, which to my understanding is roughly $700M, about $500M more than current allocated. I'm sure you are aware of the enormous amount of value that we enjoy from space science [1], and therefore why it is crucial NASA has the capability to continue to operate this communications network in order to enable that ongoing science. Thank you for your time."

They will ask for your zip code and possibly contact info to follow up (you'll usually get a letter or email from your rep on the topic).

> The agency's internal watchdog said a project to upgrade the three DSN sites with more 34-meter antennas and higher-power transmitters is five years behind schedule, and the cost of the upgrades has increased to $706 million. That expense takes a long time to pay off for the DSN's budget account, which has fallen from an annual level of about $250 million in 2010 to about $200 million today.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Benefits-Stem... (if you want specific value talking points)

Sending a letter is probably more efficient and effective than making a phone call. But bear in mind that many sensible proposals are DOA if they don't fit neatly into the hyperpartisan agenda that obtains in Congress at present. Some lawmakers would be against any sort of proposal that involves increasing spending, and when one party has a razor thin majority such ideologues have leverage disproportionate to their numbers.

For sure, but it only takes a few minutes to make the call versus asking folks here to write a letter. Default to action and all that jazz. A call is better than nothing.

Hi, 1999 called. Today, people are more along the lines of "What's a call?"

The old rule was congress critters weighted a personal letter with highest weight over a form letter, over a call, over an email. Now, staffers are of younger age, and they are the gate keepers of what gets passed along. So that order of weighting may be different now. Then again, that's probably also highly dependent on the specific congress critter. AOC may be much more open to tweets/emails/etc vs Mitch McConnell or similar aged someone

A representative from the EFF's policy team I met at def con a few weeks back mentioned that calls are still weighted heavily. YMMV.

Writing and printing a letter takes about 5 minutes, phone calls are not that time effective unless you already know the person you're calling, in my experience. Calling Congress I would expect to be on hold for a long time, plus staffers know that you're reading a script, and will also discount it because you have a general ask rather than saying 'Please vote (yes/no) on HR ####'.

>I guess it won't be long until a "genius" manager comes up with the idea of DSNaaS (Deep Space Network as a Service) :-)

Well, it doesn't seem such a bad idea considering the alternative is to do nothing. (now if the alternative was to build more sites and more antennas that would be great, but I think its unlikely).

As for DSNaaS it could be provided by a number of competing companies just like intercontinental fiber links are today.

Sorry but you are pretty much missing the entire point, maybe you aren't in the us but this doesn't work like you expect. Nasa has really limited budget options. Congress points them toward specific things like Artemis and funds those. Nasa often has to use a tiny bit of money on the side for the irreplaceable things like voyager being continued and upgrading the DSN - all the money in the world can't replace them without decades of effort, for example.

> ...live console/status of the DSN: https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

Very cool--you can even see the data rate for each one, AND the animation changes if the data rate is higher.

This is highly likely to be a dumb question, but can each dish only communicate with one object at a time?

These are highly directional antennas that are pointed at the vehicles they’re communicating with.

Yes, though sometimes we use something called "bent pipe" where we communicate with something like MRO who is then communicating to an asset on the ground at Mars, so technically we're talking to two assets, but not "really"

The DSN stations can receive from multiple spacecraft at the same time, but can only transmit to one. If you look at the DSN status station and click on the details sometimes you will see them in "MSPA (Multiple Spacecraft Per Antenna) mode". Looks like they can do 4 at the same time [0]. You will typically see this for Mars spacecraft where there are multiple within the beamwidth of the antenna.

It also looks like they have proposed some options to provide additional downlink by doing raw recording of the intermediate frequency with a high bandwidth receiver and doing the demodulation with additional processing to get telemetry/data for more spacecraft [1]. So they could support getting more data, but not necessarily "realtime" data.

[0] https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsndocs/810-005/206/206D.pdf

[1] https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-200/200B.pdf

INAL but I don't think they can strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Service_Labor-Manageme...

Artemis (like the F35/JSF) is a jobs program that happens to eventually produce an aircraft/spacecraft. Maintenance of existing communication systems doesn’t get the public excited like “we are building cutting edge aerospace technologies”

Why are we just hearing about this? Should have been trickling this out because I can't see the citizens jumping to provide funding for this. They are trying to figure out how their teenagers can afford food, car, and college while taking care of grandma. Sounds like a first world problem and the message to struggling citizens has been: make do.

You're just hearing about it because it's now in pop-sci.

Congress has been hearing about it forever. DSN has been a constrained resource for a long, long time.

Why would a teenager bother going to college, if the society they live in is decaying and doesn't even maintain capabilities it held three generations prior. Especially if the communicated focus from their parents is to only ever worry about feeding grandma and driving a car.

The cynical way I interpret this: "We need private enterprise to step in to fill this gap, because the public infrastructure is failing".

Aren't missions paying for the usage of DSN? How come a small cubesat gets the amount of time on the network comparable to JWST?

Could this be commercialized? If there's high demand it should be profitable to build new dishes to increase bandwidth.

I don’t think missions are individually billed for DSN time, rather DSN time is allocated according to NASA internal priorities. Which is a classic resourcing problem in bureaucracies.

That also explains the challenge for private investment. If none of the missions are budgeted to buy bandwidth, then you would have no customers for a private DSN service.

Yes and no. There are usage cost times for DSN stations [0]. That link is old and says it is on the order of $1000/hr in 2009. Inflation adjusted it would be more, but I think costs have actually risen to closer to a $5000/hr. Theoretically each of the eight cubesat missions would be paying this cost, so that would come out to $500k that each of them would be paying. Not a lot for larger space missions, but may be a lot for a cubesat mission. However, I doubt that they are all paying for this and is was just part of the usage agreement to host their mission on Artemis. Some of the cubesats are also NASA sponsored so they would just be paying themselves.

It likely is somewhat profitable, but would require a huge investment. Some have suggested (can't find the source) that the DSN should be charging closer to $35,000/hr to cover costs of maintenance and building new dishes to expand the network, but NASA themselves can't be a for profit company. So if there was someone providing commercial ground services for deep space, lets say with commercial efficiency they get services to cost $20,000/hr. Great! But why would I do that if I can still go to DSN and pay $5000.

But as the article indicates there were probably be a reckoning soon because I've already heard people describe scheduling and allocation of DSN time at JPL as a battle royale.

https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/files/6_NASA_MOCS_2014_10_01_...

So the DSN has some properties of cooperative multitasking ... what could go wrong?

> “When Artemis comes online, everybody else moves out of the way, and it’s an impact to all the science missions, even the flagship science missions," Dodd said.

> What makes CubeSats appealing to NASA and research scientists is what makes them unappealing to the Deep Space Network, Dodd said. ... "When your DSN is oversubscribed, I don't think it's a good use to put throwaway missions on the same set of antennas.

The problem of intergalactic communication is a plot point in this fantastic sci-fi novel I am currently reading (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep) cannot recommend enough although it doesn't really inform the current conversation :-)

If You think it's bad now, wait until Starship starts dumping hundreds of tons of space probes all over.

The obvious solution is more big antennas on Earth and network if store-and-forward relays all over the Solar System.

I predict they'll get cheap instead of fixing it.

> The obvious solution is more big antennas on Earth

Or sending less crap in space...

Wellp, at this rate they should just ask SpaceX to do it for Mars and piggyback off it for everything else.

Ok so where do we donate money?

irs.gov

It's actually part of the BFS, not the IRS: https://www.pay.gov/public/form/start/708094624

If you want it to go straight into the shredder, sure.

I can’t believe no one but the IRS wants all this money.

AMZN! Because they have AWS Ground Station https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/ :

> AWS Ground Station Easily control satellites and ingest data with fully managed Ground Station as a Service

But that doesn't solve for limited availability of regulated spectra or spectra regulation.

Can ionizing radiation affect trapped ions in crystal lattice quantum sensors, for fiber optics?

FWIU degree of collinearity is the degree of quantum entanglement for photons and probably also phonons in a vacuum?

DSN: Deep Space Network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network

Do the good people at the Flat Earth Society have any response to 'splain this away? =D

The last time a Flat Earther tried to do science they proved the earth was curved. [1]

[1] - Flat-Earther accidentally proves the earth is round in his own experiment https://youtu.be/GFqmDazwb6Y?si=4umT9XKG6ZCdJWKU

The Holographic Principle says that spacetime is 2D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

(Indeed, though, all of the other rotating bodies in n-body gravity fluid spacetime which are visible from here appear to have assumed the shape of a sphere probably like ~fixed-point attraction; and there's no way to swim to the edge)

Not so much that it is 2D, as that there’s a mathematical transformation you can do that lets you calculate its evolution in a 2D space. Which can be useful.

The “is” question is harder to evaluate, but to the degree it’s a meaningful question I’d say “probably not”.

How do fluids compress at the edge of a rotating 2D disc manifold then?

Maybe it's like Conway's Game or does it wrap around at the edge of the statically-dimensioned tensor?

Is there a transform between Minkowski 4-space rotations and 2D Holographic transformation(s)?

Mustn't they be reversible and locally unitary

(Edit)

PROMPT/QUERY: Generate SymPy with pytest.mark.parametrize tests to _ teach the transform between Minkowski 4-space rotations and 2D Holographic transformation(s)

- https://g.co/bard/share/f69e27dd9acd

- https://chat.openai.com/share/7bbda216-f232-4080-99ab-814bf6...

Do these converge upon a solution when you hit jumble?

(Edit)

From "Minkowski space" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space :

> In 3-dimensional Euclidean space, the isometry group (the maps preserving the regular Euclidean distance) is the Euclidean group. It is generated by rotations, reflections and translations. When time is appended as a fourth dimension, the further transformations of translations in time and Lorentz boosts are added, and the group of all these transformations is called the Poincaré group. Minkowski's model follows special relativity where motion causes time dilation changing the scale applied to the frame in motion and shifts the phase of light.

> Spacetime is equipped with an indefinite non-degenerate bilinear form, variously called the Minkowski metric,[2] the Minkowski norm squared or Minkowski inner product depending on the context.[nb 2] The Minkowski inner product is defined so as to yield the spacetime interval between two events when given their coordinate difference vector as argument.[3] Equipped with this inner product, the mathematical model of spacetime is called Minkowski space. The group of transformations for Minkowski space that preserve the spacetime interval (as opposed to the spatial Euclidean distance) is the Poincaré group (as opposed to the isometry group).

But then how does Minkowski space help understand signals in spacetime with nonlocality and superfluid phases in deep space?

(Edit)

Q: Can a thing causally affect things outside of its light cone?

A: Yes because Nonlocal entanglement

Q: is Minkowski space wrong or inappropriate then? And, Are causal counterfactuals the same as constructor theory counterfactuals?

Flat Earth and other such fringe theories are rarely about the thing itself. So explaining why they're wrong will rarely help because it doesn't answer the questions or resolve the problems that led them there in the first place. The theories are basically a symptom for other things, such as socioeconomic and psychological dynamics.

You cannot logic someone out of a position they didn't logic themselves into.

The DSN is just part of the conspiracy. Those antennas don't actually exist. The images are CGI, and the people who claim to work there have been brainwashed.

But how did they write the simulation for the game on all of their screens?

AI technology provided by aliens who are being held captive in area 51.

Honestly, don't they teach you kids anything in school these days?

Problems with the DSN? This is bad! Let's launch a bunch of CubeSats to fly over the antennae and monitor them for issues!

Loophole-free solutions that do not violate Bell's; entanglement communication: Entangled satellites and QKD repeaters do exist.

Godel had a few interesting spacetime solutions that may be helpful for Deep Space Communications.

Evolved Antenna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna

Rogue wave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave

Can DSN be scaled? Or would it be best to use quantum radio?

Hawking radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

Perhaps if Hawking radiation is in all the things, Hawking radiation could be used for DSN-like communications.

When phenomena in the quantum foam "dissolve", is there an ~ejection fraction? Couldn't there be ±t per minimally perturbable effect in the quantum foam, though? Maybe internet/p2p-like routing algorithms, or, which field/wave/fluid perturbations are omnidirectional?

Rydberg antenna / Rydberg sensor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rydberg_atom

> The Rydberg sensor can reliably detect signals over the entire spectrum and compare favourably with other established electric field sensor technologies, such as electro-optic crystals and dipole antenna-coupled passive electronics.[59][60]

Additional methods that could potentially be useful if Godel-like wormholes and massless particles are still considered infeasible:

Ambient backscatter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_backscatter

Backscatter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter

Passive W-Fi: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_Wi-Fi

LiFi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi

With ambient backscatter, passive WiFi is already implemented; and maybe someday backscatter LiFi could achieve very high signal efficiency at low-energy in deep space, too?

Could there be deviations from stable patterns in the CMB: Cosmic Microwave Background?

Quantum navigation maps such signal sources such that inexpensive sensors can achieve something like inertial navigation FWIU?

"Smaller, more versatile antenna could be a communications game-changer" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37337628 :

> LightSlingers use volume-distributed polarization currents, animated within a dielectric to faster-than-light [FTL] speeds, to emit electromagnetic waves. (By contrast, traditional antennas employ surface currents of subluminally moving massive particles on localized metallic elements such as dipoles.) Owing to the superluminal motion of the radiation source, LightSlingers are capable of “slinging” tightly focused wave packets with high precision toward a location of choice. This gives them potential advantages over phased arrays in secure communications such as 4G and 5G local networks

/? Curved photon beams: https://www.google.com/search?q=curved+photon+beam

Newer Waveguide approaches;

- "Experiment demonstrates continuously operating optical fiber made of thin air" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35812168

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36408561

- https://phys.org/news/2023-06-trillionths-photon-pairs-compr... :

> The physicists chose the incidence angles and frequencies so that the co-propagating electrons, which fly through vacuum at half the speed of light, overlap with optical wave crests and troughs of exactly the same speed

PROMPT: Read/write nonlocal spacetime with minimal perturbations at safe energy levels for high-throughput data transmission over astronomical-scale distances

Reply on news.ycombinator.com