 Hello everyone and welcome to Tomorrow Space Orbit 12.36. I'm Jared, I'm going to be your host for today's episode where we will be talking about something that is so important to spaceflight that we wouldn't be able to do it without it and to talk about it. We have Richard Stevenson, the operations director down at Canberra Deep Space Network. So Richard, can you tell us a little bit about what exactly is the Deep Space Network? The Deep Space Network is essentially an interface between the project and the spacecraft. So obviously if you're launching a project, so if you want to be able to communicate with your spacecraft and serve, yes, the Deep Space Network or NASA's Deep Space Network allows that communication channel, I suppose. Now there's three complexes around the world and that's to provide 24-7 coverage. We're around about 120 degrees apart. We've got Canberra where I am at the moment and we've got Colestone in California in between LA and Vegas. Just off a small town called Barstow. Then we've got one just outside of Madrid and Spain as well. So it sounds like the DSN has a lot to work with. Are you guys fully stacked 24-7, 365? Things are scheduled down to the minute to make that happen? Definitely. So it's certainly all scheduled. JPL, actually I should point out the hub of the DSN is JPL. So if anybody's been to JPL and seen the dark room, so that we stay referred to at the center of the universe. So the operations chief sits there with the TSSs and he's coordinating the network and then you have us at the stations as well who are actually doing the tracking. So yeah, it's an interesting web all over the world. So I said with three complexes, the JPL hub is the most important. And we're talking about interfaces with the project, generally the project interfaces with JPL and it talks to the complexes from there. So a project can subscribe to their data and they can have it delivered in real time from their spacecraft or they can come in the following morning and find this nice little packaged up bit of data that we received during the night. And Deepod Dolphin in our chat room is asking, are you going to be adding more ground stations in the future as Deepod Dolphin is noticing that there's a big gap over Asia? No, no, it's funny because if you start looking at where the DSN is evolving, they're now talking about optical as well. I think the first spacecraft that we have that's capable of optical is Psyche, which is coming up in a few years time. It's not in its core communication package, it's all class of science. So look, we might, and then we've got to start asking the question, is Canberra, Madrid and Goldstein really suitable for optical? So there may be a separation at some point, but at the moment where the complexes are, you've got the infrastructure, you've got the antenna, there doesn't have to be any more because we have a 24-7. What we do need to do, because we have fairly congested periods as well where the projects are fighting for time, we do need further assets. So currently in Madrid, you've got two new beam waveguides being built. So we're slated for another one in Canberra and so is Goldstein. So yeah, what we're doing is we're increasing the number of assets of these complexes instead of building new complexes. So three sites, they're all very close to being equidistant from each other. Is that a choice? Yeah, about 120 degrees. So they like to use a magic 120 because it divvies up 360 into 3. ESA uses the same one. ESA slips it slightly. So if you look at the where the ESA stations are, they've got one in Western Australia, in New Norcia. They've got one in Argentina and they've got one in Europe as well. So they're doing the same thing. ESA only has a 35-meter in each one. So occasionally we all support ESA spacecraft as well if they're getting a little overloaded with their antenna as well. Yeah, I was actually going to ask, you know, because it's not necessarily a NASA spacecraft that DSN may be talking about. Who are some that you support? Well, at the at the moment, so we support any agency that NASA has an agreement with and that the current agency is with our JAXA and we support their Planet C and their High Booster 2 operations. We support ISRO. Until recently we supported the Mandrayan, which was their Mars orbiter, and Chandrayaan 2, which is their lunar orbiter. And so we supported the landing or the lander, unfortunately, when it was unsuccessful too. But yeah, the spill, the Israeli spill a couple of years back. So we supported that and going forward, you know, I think we've got the Emirates on the books as well in a couple of years for their first spacecraft to Mars. So yes, it's any agency that NASA has an agreement with. And you have to obviously be operating the Deep Space Network at all times. The GoSkins in our YouTube channel is asking, you know, have the brush fires that have unfortunately been affecting Australia, have they affected operations and kind of to talk to that too, you know, here in Southern California, we had a significant earthquake in July. We had a 7.1 that was out in just about a couple tens of miles north of where Goldstone was at. So do you, does the Deep Space Network basically brush that off and just keep going? Not earthquakes. Very hard to brush a little bit. So as far as the fires are concerned, so look, Canberra was impacted in the early 2000s and the fires came very close to the complex and they were fighting fires on the complex then. But one of the reasons why Canberra was picked is as far as we have no fault lines, we're 100 per cent stable here. Goldstone, and if you've been to Goldstone, they've just had an upgrade as well with all their racks and they have their new soft boots on the bottom as well just to prevent damage in an earthquake. It was one of the first times I've known an antenna be stopped during an earthquake, so in the recent ones that you were just describing, so DSS-14 just to be 70 metres there, nice picture. So yeah, so it was read and required engineering check out that after the last one, but so there was no damage to that. Look, I suppose if you look at the antennas you're showing that they're kind of robust antennas. You look at a radio astronomy antenna and for a start, hey, you might not have to move like you look like Garo Sebo, it's just the focus that changes. We have a 34 metre of parks run by CSIRO as well, but its elevation only goes down to 30 degrees. Again, this meant to look at celestial objects, not spacecraft. You look at the DSN antenna, they look like battleships. So the big, robust, heavy, and it takes an awful lot to have an impact on them. And in our YouTube chat, Gregorius Sodharmo, hopefully I got that right Gregorius, is asking, how big bandwidth and fast can you push the deep space network to? And are there upgrades planned in relation to the new Artemis and Mars projects? And also, Raj Lutra in our YouTube channel is asking as well about upgrades to communicate with spacecrafts and rovers at faster communication speeds as well. So what can you really crank at? What's the fastest up and down that you can do? And then you're talking optical too, so what are we looking at with that? Look, I have no idea with optical, so we haven't actually seen the design specs for the optical yet. But you look at, it depends on the bands as well. And if you go through the DSM bands that we use, Sierra band, which is 2.2 gig. So we use that generally to the moon, a little bit beyond. So there are some agencies that use it beyond. Then we start talking about X-ray band as well. So you're starting to talk about deep space around the 8 gig, 80.4. Then you start kicking it up to K2, which is 26-27 gig. And we use that for closer spacecraft that need to dump higher rates of data. So you're looking at the likes of TESS, who are delivering 400 megabits, which is kind of cranked and out. So then you've also got the K-band as well, which is a DSN K-band, which is deep space, like SPP or Parker Solar Pro, as it's called now. And so yeah, it's where do we go from here? People are saying that optical, we really need optical if we're going to bring back bandwidth we want to from Mars. But at the moment, we seem to be able to deliver the required bandwidths with the existing spacecraft that we have. As I said, TESS with 400 megabits is incredible. Yeah, I actually would like to go back to that screen that we had while Richard was talking, showing the dishes in real time. This is a thing called DSN now. And Richard, can you speak to this a little bit for our viewers so they can know what they're looking at? Yeah, so well, at the moment, this is a snapshot of what the network's doing. You've got the Madrid-Colston and Canberra antenna. Look, I love this as well. So this isn't just for the public. So I'll quite happily have a look. And if I'm at home, just a bit sad to see what we're supporting. So and it shows a 70 meter and the three being waveguides in each. And obviously, the waveform coming down is what's being received. The waveform going up is what's being transmitted. You can see whether it's modulated or not. So there is a modulated wave on it. So you can see it is just carrier or whether we actually are receiving telemetry. In this case, they all are. It shows the 70 meter as well in Canberra. It's actually doing three spacecraft. And we're actually, you're talking about software developments and evolution of the DSN. It's been identified long ago that Mars was going to be the contention where we're just going to have so many spacecraft around Mars. And so essentially, not enough assets to support it. So a lot of the software developments in the systems at the moment is to expand that capability with Mars spacecraft to add more. The beauty of Mars is that we can point directly into the middle of Mars. And the beam width of all the antennas incorporates not only the planets of a space on either side. So we don't have any spacecraft outside of that beam, even the big elliptical orbiters like Maven. And yeah, I've lost my chain of thought there. So with the 70 meter, and I'm actually just looking at the window at the 70 meter now. I might be able to just bring that up. You can actually set up a camera. Go for it. You brought a prop today. There's your prop. I talked to prop. So this is a current view of the 70 meter. So we're tracking the three spacecraft. And as I said, so we point directly at Mars. And there's a number of spacecraft that we can track around it. There is one limitation. And that is we can only uplink to one at a time. So we're talking about high bit rates. And so what's required by the project. So the big one around Mars at the moment is MRL. That requires lots of bandwidth. And they'll increase, I should also say that the spacecrafts have variable bit rates. So they can change it. So the spacecraft is uploaded with a schedule. So it knows what antenna it's communicating with. So it knows that if a 34 meter is supporting, then it can drop that bit rate. But it knows that when it's over a 70 meter, then it can increase that bit rate proportionally. So there's a little bit of leeway there. So for instance, MRO on the 70 meter here. So it could be bringing down a high rate. We might not have an uplink available for it. But we can provide that uplink from a 34 meter. So it doesn't all have to be on the same antenna. We can bring telemetry down from one and provide a command capability to another. And that is an incredible amount of efficiency being built into a system. That's just fantastic. Well, it is actually. So you're talking about efficiency and you're looking at our days and we plan our days and how many spacecraft. We fluctuate a little bit, but generally it's the high 20s. So for my day shift, and this isn't in the 24 hour period. So for my day shift when Canberra took control of the network at 9 o'clock this morning. And so we really wished to Madrid at five and finish up at six. So yeah, we'll have 30, mid 20s, 30 supports during that period. And Madrid and Goldstone will have something similar. So we currently have the mid 30s spacecraft on the books. So it's always a very busy schedule. And you can see when you look at the schedule, how difficult it is for projects to find time. Obviously there is, if a project is desperate and they declare spacecraft emergency, it's the same as maritime law, where all the other projects have to help out and give up some time. But yeah, other than that, so the schedule, if you're planning, for instance, an event or a launch in two or three years time, that has to go into the schedule to see whether the DSM is capable of supporting. But also, with the other routine spacecraft, you've got the voyagers supported almost on a daily basis. So they have to find time as well. So yeah, when I talk about building new assets, that's really to not only allow more spacecraft, but also allow the existing spacecraft to be supported too. And you talked about coming in and how many you do at day. What is your day to day like? Because I mean, this is the deep space network is not diverse. I would imagine it's like we said at the beginning of the show, it's not exactly something that a lot of people know about. You know, I'm sure people can get a really easy day by day as to what it's like for somebody going into Johnson Space Center to be a flight flight controller for the space station. But what the heck is it like being day by day doing operations at the deep space network? Well, the asset diverse, the beauty of the job. And now I started, I was recruited from the UK just straight out of college in 1988. And so the most I did want to work for NASA in Australia. So and I came over here for the Voyager Neptune encounter just prior. So essentially, there was a lead in training. And since then, so I've been involved with every NASA spacecraft in the last 32 years. So the Voyagers are the only ones now that are still going from when I started. But yes, the day when you walk in, it's funny that after 32 years, you're still supporting the same spacecraft. You see Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 like an old friend. But you also get the new projects coming in all the time. As far as my day, I'll walk in. And so I have a team of controllers. And I'm also a controller. So I can jump into the seats. In fact, that's what I love about the job. I can sort of get my hands dirty. And it could be so, you know, one minute you're doing, you know, you avoid you, then you could be on to a test, then you'll be going into a parker. You know, you could be having a few issues with Maven around Mars or and and that's what keeps it really interesting. It's just continuously cycling through. And just when things start to get a little mundane, a new project comes along. And so you'll go, oh my gosh, surely they're not going to try this. Now I just remember where the power finders went and landed on Mars with the airbags. And we were going, oh, what do you reckon the chance of that working is? But yeah, brilliantly successful and so and we've been after a bad run of Mars, so in the late 90s, so we've it's been brilliant. So as far as the success rate of our Mars missions and so. And what's it take to become a controller at the Deep Space Network? Well, it's funny because as you said, you just can't go out there and say, oh, I think I'll recruit another controller. The background of all the control of it. It used to be it was very much RF. So my background is RF and radio and radar. And that's why I did a college. But we also have the digit side as well and software. And as the DSN has evolved, so it has a role as well. Obviously the system administrator role is far more important. But we identified the fact that, you know, we recruited RF people and we that recruited digit people and each offered unique skills. But we needed to get the RF people up on the digits and the digits up on the RF. So around about 10 years ago, we actually had a certification program, which is the first time that essentially we had a NASA DSN controller certification program. So so yeah, we've tried to do that benchmark. So regardless of where your background is, there's a common knowledge in the RF and the digit side. And working for the Deep Space Network for over three decades, I bet there has to have been- Oh, Sam, so long when you say it that way. Sorry, I'm so sorry. I bet there has to have been a ton of interesting things that you have been witness to throughout your time there. And Lupi in our chat room is actually asking, you know, do you have any interesting stories you could share? Any crazy hijinks? Close calls? Silly technical problems? Like what's the wildest and funniest stuff that's happened to you? Look, so there is so many. I have some people on the team and they all say, do you remember when we did this and we saw this with that spacecraft? I'm going, no, not really. So some people have far better memories of me. I just say, oh, that was an interesting day. I'll move on to the next. You know, you talk about spacecraft and so, look, I love the story of in the early days, I think it was the 90s, ESA had their first cluster spacecraft that were going to be launched. And it was the first time ESA had come over here to support one of those spacecraft. And they brought their own ground systems with them as well. And I can still remember. So you look at the DSN, it's all battleship gray. You walk into the front end areas and all the racks are battleship gray. It seems that it only came in one tone of paint. And their ground systems arrived and they were cream with Mercedes Benz all over the top. And I thought, oh, wow, I never thought I'd ever have rack envy. And so the first cluster, we also had an ESA engineer out here, a gentleman called Peter. And he was going to be there for the launch in an early orbit phase as well. And I can still remember standing in the operations room, so watching this launch. And obviously, if anybody knows the first cluster, it was unsuccessful and ended up falling into the swamps of French Guiana. But when we saw it explode, the first thing, so he said, it was Shison. And he goes, well, I suppose I'm going home. And probably within five minutes of that, one of our controls had strung up a big for sale all over the Mercedes racks. I sort of hoping they were going to leave them, but so they never did. But yeah, it's, look, one thing. So you realize in this industry is nothing is a hundred percent. You know, it's whether we've had spacecraft that and sometimes there can be silly errors. I can remember the Pobos missions that we supported. And it was all down to a controller switching off the batteries and a solar panel at the same time or heaters being switched off and so spacecraft essentially freezing. I mean, there's so many variables that you have in space. So there's so many errors that you can make. And some of them just aren't recoverable. You can't just walk up there and press the reset button. But also you've got the same issues here on earth, you know, so the antennas, although I said they're big and robust, you know, the specifications required to track a spacecraft are absolutely mind boggling. You know, so when you start looking at the beam, so I keep on looking at the 17 meter on my window, you look at the beam with the 17 meter, I'll give you a picture just because I can. There it is. So if you look at that, the beam bits of the 70 meter is, you know, so with X band, it's 32 milli degrees, you know, so with S band, it's 118. And that's the three. So you're half that. And which means that's your error. And then you drop you drop in the spacecraft by 3 dB, which is enough to kill telemetry if you don't have those margins. So there's always things that some reflector on 43, we had issues with a little while ago. So and it just took one tiny component. And so if it was wiping out one spacecraft after another, you're talking about the earthquakes in Madrid as well. So look, there's so many good star stories. And I saw one of my favorites is Cassini, you know, as we were talking about before, you know, I was there at the end as well. And it was actually a really sad day. It was a sad day because I think I'd actually stamp this human type personality onto it because spacecraft do have personalities. So whatever, people try and tell you otherwise. And it's a bit like a person. So when you talk to them, you know, so you pick up their mannerisms, their characteristics and you form an impression sustained with spacecraft. Some of them are unreliable. Some of them are always late, just like people. Some of them can go for a bit of a wobble. They can go a little unstable occasionally and we have to adapt for that. You know, so I think you had a gentleman talking about the Marcos from JPL. And look, the Marcos were a brilliant mission. So it was as far as cost, cost effective and essentially success. I mean, they brought the insight later down flawlessly. But when he was talking about the loss of propellant, so we were seeing that on the ground, you know, we're the ones that are saying to project, look, you know, we're seeing oscillations here. So we're seeing fluctuations. It looks like if your spacecraft is rolling. And so it's a DSN, they'll see telemetry but without any telemetry they can't interpret. So what we have to do is say, well, this is what we see on the ground. Now we are seeing oscillations. We are seeing variations every minute and a half as your spacecraft is rolling. And that's, you know, you were talking about spacecraft, distant ones as well. And the voyages, both voyages at the moment, all other end to stellar space. So drifting on, they're really dynamic spacecraft. So two or three times, so an hour, they actually have to correct the pointing on the high gain antenna. It's got a 12-foot antenna that has to be orientated to Earth. It has a sun sensor, which obviously uses our sun to sense, just, which corrects the urine pitch. But then you've also got some of the star scanner as well that controls roll. And I always thought that once the voyager was going to disappear, it was going to be through power. A little RTGS, it's half-life and the thermocouples degrading as well. But for the first time, we were having issues with that, pointing from Voyager 1. And we were seeing those on the downlink as well. They were slowly dipping and we were having problems locking. So from 22 billion kilometers, Project was able to send corrections to the sun sensor and biases. But it made me realize that it's not just power. There are so many things that can happen to all spacecraft that can be showstoppers. And you're talking about the purpose of the DSN. Yes, we have an antenna on Earth, but a spacecraft has an antenna as well that it has to orientate to Earth. And if the two aren't pointing at each other, then there's no mission. So some spacecraft will have low-gain antennas, which they can use to, if there's an error, to flip to, allow us to get commands in and hopefully correct an issue. But with the voyagers, they're so far out, so they have a high-gain antenna and a high-gain antenna. So if it's not pointing to Earth, then I said the mission ends. So there's always things going wrong. And that's why we're here. Those spacecraft need very little interaction. We can configure it and sort of support it, finish up, and then we have the ones that are very much manual stick control. And they're actually the fun ones. You're talking about lunar orbiters. We've got Chandrayaan at the moment, the ISRO spacecraft. And it's very much manual as it comes out of authorization around the moon. So we manually sort of enable drive to actually capture the spacecraft. So send a command to it. We see the spacecraft go two-way because it's so coherency is what we're looking for, where essentially the spacecraft references our clock. Really good for Doppler. We can tell exactly the velocity of the spacecraft. And so, yeah, and then we get telemetry from it. So every day is interesting. And it's not just all about experiences because every spacecraft is different. As I said, there's personality. Do you have your favorites and not-so-favorites? And that comes down to the characteristics of the spacecraft. And do you have a favorite spacecraft? Or is that sort of like asking, what's your favorite child? I'll be quite happy to throw a number of them under the bus, but I won't tell you which ones. I have probably sentimental attachment to those voyages. And I said that's because they've lasted my entire career. And if they can just last another five or six years, we'll retire together. And then I think I was a two spacecraft controller. So lasted the entire period. Projects I really like at the moment, the MMS, the Magnospheric Multiscale spacecraft. And that's just because of the scope. So they're looking for the magnetic connect between the sun and Earth. And they're flying in for the tiller with a degree of accuracy, just mind-boggling. And they'll zoom in around Earth and close up, and they'll go into a data collection mode as it comes back out. Dom's data. And it was actually an interesting one because when MMS came along, it was actually a bit of a pain spacecraft to support. So there's four of them, and they have to be tracked in sequence. So one, two, three, four. And you're talking about scheduling, so being tight, to actually incorporate the MMS supports. Our countdown time had to be reduced between them. So instead of normally 45 minutes, 10 minutes. So we went from one spacecraft to another with only a 10-minute gap. But they, as far as emissions, brilliant. It did offer a couple of challenges tracking, but that's become the norm now. But even at Parkhouse, the Solar Probe, that's another amazing one. And so it's a support that has so many stages. You get where it is about to enter, essentially, not far from the sun's atmosphere, where we have problems talking to it on a really low rate. So as it comes out again, so free of the sun's influence and it can downlink the high-rate K-band data. And it's flying out as far as almost Venus. In fact, they're actually about to go through a Venus flyby. So there's so many really interesting ones. You have ones that you like a little less, but that's purely because they're difficult to support. I would have thought Cassini, Cassini was a lovely one, but it was a pain. So this was a spacecraft not only whizzing round Saturn, but it was doing the moons, one moon after the other. And we had these experiments called bistatic radar, where essentially they used the transverses on Cassini to bounce off Titan and we'll receive those bounce signals at Earth. And the preamble for the support was like three hours where we were just following one sequence after another. There was hundreds of steps to calibrate our downlink systems. So yeah, that was a pain, but I still have fond memories of Cassini as well. And with the Voyager spacecraft, I mean, they're 42 years old. Voyager 1 is 22 billion kilometers away from us. How do you work with something that's that far away? I mean, the transmitter on Voyager, I think it's like 20 watts, I think is how much power, but it's ridiculously tiny. And then also like you, do you have to use support equipment from 42 years ago to talk to it? Yes, in a way. So even the, they've had to, we now have an industry standard. So actually, I should point out that any, any mission now that uses essentially a CCSDS format, which is an industry standard for communicating to, to the spacecraft. So that, so it means that what we can track any agency spacecraft as long as they're using that international standard. Voyager's had to adapt to that a little bit. So the commanding, for instance, they've had to form, go in or transfer into those types of blocks. But now look, as people keep on thinking, because we have a spacecraft 22 billion kilometers away, it's, it must be the weakest spacecraft we support. And it's not, so not by our long shots. So if you start, it all comes down to the mission purpose. Obviously, Voyager, huge high gain antenna to deliver data down to earth, a 20, 20 watt transmitter or 22 watt transmitter. So and, and we were still able to get 160 bits down with plenty of margin on the 70 meters. So Voyager one still has a working eight track tape recorder as well. And so every few months it will do a dump of that data. So and essentially normally it's always covered on, on Goldstone. And it's a 1400 bits down. And they need the 70 meter and all three beam wave guides arraying that one as well. So yeah, it's, it's cut back in itself is kind of incredible that we can get 1.4 K from 22 billion kilometers away. But I said it depends on the purpose of the spacecraft. Now we've got Maven, for instance, around Mars, and a previous spacecraft messenger. Where the primary goal of the project is to collect science data. So while it's orientating its high gain antenna to the planet, it's using a low gain antenna from the back. So and the signal that it's being received is far lower than the Voyager signal that we received normally. And the bit rate is lower as well, you know, we can be receiving 11 bits a second. And all they require is a spacecraft help. So within that 11 bits is just saying, either yes, I'm happy or no, I need a little bit of attention. Just like New Horizons did, so on its nine year journey out to Pluto, so it will go into hypernation. So for the long periods to conserve power. And every now and again, it would send a simple tone down. I see one of the one of four tones. You had obviously a happy happy tone, a sad tone and indeterminate tones in between. So and that was really low as well, because it was using this low gain antenna. So it's, yeah, it's a strange one. You think the further out is obviously needs to be grand antenna, but that's not necessarily true. So it really depends on the mission and their design. And even though Cassini was a little bit of a, I guess a pain, if you will, for the deep space network, the best possible way I should point out to the Cassini folks. Oh yeah, definitely. It's always, it's a great problem to have. But he stoves is asking, you know, what was it like to see the loss of the Cassini signal in real time? Because that was a, it was a nearly 20 year mission wrapping up. Yeah, you got to watch that happen. I suppose bittersweet would be the best way to describe it. So you had, obviously, you had the sense of loss and it was literally a sense of loss. Actually, you only saw the two, we were lucky. So we've actually set it up. So you saw three frequencies. And I was doing an interview with Catalyst at the time and I was predicting how the signals were going to disappear. I was saying, well, based on the beam width of the antenna, the first one to disappear would be cave end. And so the next one, because it's such a tight beam. And then the next one that would disappear was X band because that's a little broader. And then the last one is a more is a big robust Sierra band. And so as I was seeing one after the other disappear, each one was a sense of loss. But then after they all disappeared, it was a case of what a brilliantly successful mission that was. So suddenly it was, wow, what an accomplishment these guys have made. And so, so yeah, as I said, bittersweet, it brought down some amazing science. It was, oh, there we go. So we got X band and S there was also a K band as well, which was coming down on on a 34 meter. That 43 strangely enough doesn't have a DSNK band, frequency band. So, yeah, so 43 is the, oh, there we go. It's funny the thing to think of afterwards because after I've done the interview, I'm thinking, did I get the order right? I had so many self doubts of getting the order right of which ones. It was only when I forced myself to watch it again that I didn't get it right. But yeah, I was a little paranoid there for a while that it'd been broadcast in error. But yeah, so Cassini was, it was, that was a fun mission. I should point out, when you asked about favorite missions, probably Hayabusa. You know, so if you're ever going to launch a Swiss army knives of spacecraft, ask the Japanese. So, I mean, that's just, we have our own sort of asteroid chaser with the Syrox going to Japano, but the Hayabusa around regular, and it's just on its way back now. And it's a little sample of the asteroid is going to be dropped in South Australia. And, but that was, we always get the briefings. So before any activity comes, we put everything into levels. Level one is the most critical, and it's normally a launch or a landing or an orbit insertion. And then you have level two, which is pretty done close to a one. Level three, so is heightened awareness. And when we get a level three, they have to provide a briefing of what the spacecraft is doing. And Hayabusa, it was just like, you look at the briefing and seriously they're doing this, whether it's throwing holistic projectiles at the asteroid, throwing little rovers at it. So, throwing out markers as it says, orbiting this thing. As far as brilliance, the Hayabusa mission, I think so would be right up there. Well, yeah, I remember seeing a lot of those images and things from it too. And they just, Swiss army knife really is a good way to describe just how much they packed Have a blade for everything. Yeah, exactly. Even a bottle opener to crack open some samples from the surface as well. So when there is like a major problem with a spacecraft, how does the deep space network handle that? Well, so first of all, we have to categorize it. You know, I was talking about the issue with Voyager and the project, that they're looking at data coming down. And if we can't deliver data, we have to give them a reason why. And, you know, so we'll say, look, we're seeing that the spacecraft is low. For instance, the signal we're seeing from the spacecraft is low. We'll go through troubleshooting on the ground to make sure that there's nothing wrong with the antenna pointing, the low noise amplifiers, the receiver systems. We have redundancy for a number of things, not all. If we can, we can throw another asset onto another antenna just to verify that there is an issue. So project don't see telemetry and we're trying our hardest to deliver it. So whether it means moving up a size of antenna going to the 70 meter is one thing. We're also looking at the profile from the spacecraft as well. Are we seeing it modulated? Has the spacecraft gone into saving? So every spacecraft has a saving mode or an emergency mode. Where if something goes wrong, for instance, the clash between the CPUs or whether the star scanner's got out of alignment, it goes into a saving mode. The saving mode normally means that, you know, it'll kind of reset. You'll go to a low gain antenna. It'll go to a low bit rate as well. So if we see that break from a high rate to suddenly we go low rate, then we start saying we need to reconfigure for that possible spacecraft saving and we'll inform project as well. So yeah, I think for the DSN, a lot of the time, it's a case of, okay, what are we seeing? The project can't. What can we interpret and tell project that, you know, it's a possible issues? Now, we knew from the Voyager, the Voyager project thought that they were hitting Linkmarge and they thought the Voyager one was getting too far out. And what we were seeing didn't make sense then because it wasn't just a spacecraft, it came. We were seeing a spacecraft that was oscillating. So sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad. And we were able to feed that back to the project as well and said, well, we don't believe it's Linkmarge. And what we think is there's some sort of orientation of the high gain antenna, because we're actually seeing it wasn't just a sinusoidal wave, it was an abrupt change. So we'd see the cycle with a slight kick at the bottom. And that was obviously the little thrusters on board. So with the sunsets are just moving off just a little bit, detecting that it was off point and then just kicking in again. And that's when we saw the signal improve and it would drift off. So a lot of it is characterizing what we're seeing and informing the project. And what's the future of the Deep Space Network looking like? Because we have a lot of folks in our chat room that are asking that, you know, headcrab on YouTube is asking, you know, with more and more missions and rovers. Is there a limit to what you can do? Stephen Porter? It's incredible. Actually, there was an earlier question about human spaceflight as well. Strangely enough, we haven't heard a huge amount of how the DSM will support it, although we have been told it will be supported, not only the lunar missions, but also the Mars missions. We are going through software upgrades as well. And our new data delivery system has now been modified to include essentially voice communications. It's a self-proclaimed, we'll declare ourselves astronaut ready, because we can now do all aspects of support. So as I said, we can deliver telemetry and voice. We're still not sure what the demands of the DSM are going to be when Artemis goes up. We're hearing conflicting reports of, you know, they may not want support every day. So yes, it's going to be fairly intensive. And until that solidifies, I think it's very hard to plan for. But when I first started, we were actually supporting a shuttle before the TDRS network went up. So in my career, I have a little bit of experience with supporting human spaceflight. And I can remember in those days, it was incredibly arduous because there was a level of competency required that we've never had to deal with before. And I said, so if that comes in for the new human spaceflight, it's going to make things really interesting for the DSM. And also, John Bensted in YouTube is asking, will the deep space network support commercial spacecraft to the venture beyond CIS Lunar Space? So is there any potential, like, private partnerships that are going to happen? Well, I suppose SpaceX would probably be there. Although SpaceX is trying to find their own network as well. I suppose we have to remember the DSM is not the only game in town. The DSM is by far the largest. So we also have the ESA network as well. We have a number of commercial players coming into the scene too, who are looking at supporting the SpaceX and the more commercial aspects of space communications. As far as NASA, look, if somebody, if a commercial entity, so went to NASA and said, this is what we're proposing, I'm sure that it would certainly be considered. You know, I said, we are doing Israel. We did do the Israelis at really short notice as well. And that was a semi-commercial. That was, I think, a privately funded spacecraft. So yeah, certainly on the books, but ultimately, the DSM has to support NASA spacecraft. And so as soon as we're taking on commercial customers, that gives less time to our call business, which is NASA spacecraft. All right. So basically, if you want to support your spacecraft, kind of build your own, or give NASA a little reason for doing that with you there. That's right. There are different ones. I mean, there's a number of networks for close Earth. We've got the USNL and the Swedish Space Corporation as well. I think the Chinese are building their own subnetwork too. The Indians have a deep space network, but it's really just limited to the skies over India. So that's the same with JAXA. And that's probably why we support a lot of the other agencies as well. Not everybody wants to have to build antennas all over the world. They'll build one in their home country, and they'll ask another agency to support their spacecraft during critical supports, knowing that to the majority of it they'll be able to support through their own antennas. And to kind of wrap it up here from our YouTube chat, we have a question from R1, which is something that everybody always asks them this, which is that if you had all the funding you wanted, so since you guys are the deep space network is supported by NASA, if you had all the funding you wanted, what would you do with the current system? Boy, more antennas. We had a group of Samsung out here and he said, and it was a similar question. So what could we do for you? And I said, more assets. So when you start having projects fighting over time, arguing over who has priority, so then maybe you don't have enough assets. And so I think that'd be the biggest thing. I'd have the 34 meters of great antennas, a little jelly mold antenna, a couple of years construction. We can array, I didn't really cover that, but we can array our antennas so that it takes four 34 meters for the equivalent 70 on the downlinks. But yes, the more antennas the better, I think. So we have the infrastructure in place, we have the control room, the physical hardware in the field. Yeah. Well, it's so cool to hear about the deep space network, the literal bandwidth of the solar system talking all around and getting that to everybody. And maybe one day we can do tomorrow from Mars and we'll have to use the deep space network. Actually, just on a parting note, so I was listening to an interview with somebody who put their name down for the Mars, humans to Mars, and they were talking about their journey to Mars. And they were saying, but that's okay. Communication is fine. We can communicate and we have Skype. And I can remember my first thought was, it'd be a little stilted in conversation. So I think Mars at its closest is sort of about six, seven minutes round trip, light time furthest is 44 minutes. So if you're expecting this chat to Mars, so with a 44 minutes as a cause and effect, so to get a response, I think, so yeah, it'd be a very long conversation. All right, well, I guess we're going to have to bring someone along to chat with us in order to do that. And you know, we have a ton of questions that we didn't even get to with you, Richard. So we're going to go ahead and do those in our aftershow today to talk with that. And one of the ways that you can see that is if you become a citizen of tomorrow. And we always want to thank our citizens of tomorrow as well, because we can't do this show without you. We can't do the news without you. We can't do letting off steam without you. You're the ones who help make this happen. And if you would like to become a citizen of tomorrow, you can head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join. And you get to see things like what we're about to do after the show with Richard, which is basically everybody who's asked a question so far will try and grab all those questions and throw them at Richard and get you that opportunity to talk to somebody who's actually doing real stuff, which is so cool. I'm so glad we get to do that. And our ultimate goal is to get people excited about space. And our citizens help us do that. And you get to do some cool stuff on the side with that. So that wraps up orbit 12 dot 36 for us here today. So until the next one, keep exploring.