Downloading the Webb Scope's data starts with a 6-month scheduling scramble

The remarkable images and data captured by the James Webb Space Telescope are being sent to Earth after more than six months of jockeying to secure network resources, NASA has revealed. The Webb (JWST) phones home over the Deep Space Network (DSN), the world's largest and most sensitive scientific telecommunications system. …

[firstnamebunchofnumbers]

DSN Now

Thanks for sharing this amazing link https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html I'm basically addicted to it already!

[short]

Re: DSN Now

There's a good book for this stuff, if you fancy - Uplink Downlink: A History of the Nasa Deep Space Network, 1957-1997 (The Nasa History Series, 2001 4227) S/N #033-000-01241-1

I have it in hardback, but it appears it's a download at NASA, too.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20020033033/downloads/20020033033.pdf

Enjoy!

[Neil Barnes]

The DSN will be too slow to communicate ...

Ansibles. That's what they need, Ansibles.

[druck]

Chuck another shrimp on the barbie

You would think given the cost of the spacecraft and how much science data it is likely to return over it's lifetime, they would have budgeted for adding another dish to the DSN.

[Anonymous Coward]

"adding another dish to the DSN"

Musk promised that SpaceX was(1) going to have its own DSN, with fully automatic self-steering dishes, ready by 2019 to support the first manned Mars mission. And the costs would be such that it would be financially insane to buy any other DSN, as it would give such a high return on investment.

There may be a slight delay.(2)

(1) this is a lie - afaik!

(2) lemon scented wipes not included

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of other players

You can even get landing services from AWS these days, but it makes sense for the US and NASA to have their own infrastructure here, especially for C2 functions.

That said, DSN has and will be upgraded on an ongoing basis. It's certainly come a long way from Voyager 1. I don't know if there is a version changelog somewhere on a NASA server, but I expect that dish upgrades and expansions will happen periodically, but many may be hand-me-downs from NRO and the DOD side of things.

[Death Boffin]

Multiple dishes

One thing to remember is that each DSN site has multiple dishes. While the headline big dish communicates with Voyager, smaller dishes are used for planetary missions. Webb being relatively close to Earth, doesn't need a particularly big dish.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Multiple dishes

Yep, I'm lucky enough to live a short drive from a DSN site (there's a visitor's centre with some great displays, my kids love it). It has one impressively huge dish and half a dozen only-fairly-big ones.