Communication - Specifications (page 11 of 11)
Earth Station
The Deep Space Network (DSN) is a network of dish antennas, strategically located around the world to support interplanetary missions, and radio and radar astronomy observations. The Dishes are located at 120o longitude apart around the earth in three locations:
- Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex- near Barstow, California, USA
- Robledo de Chavela- near Madrid, Spain
- Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex- near Canberra, Australia
With such strategic location, the DSN can communicate to and from any space craft without any break.
Of the different types of antennas, we have employed the 70m diameter dish antenna for this Venus mission. The dish has a gain of 74.6dB for X-band with very low pointing loss, and low Antenna-microwave noise temperature of 12dB leading to a total Noise temperature of 17dB in the X-band.
The Orbiter satellite will transmit data to the DSN 70m subnet once every eight hours. It can also be instructed to transmit once a day or less frequently.