Canberra celebrates 60-year NASA collaboration with new dish

NASA’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra celebrated its 60th anniversary on 19 March 2025 while also breaking ground on a new radio antenna. These two achievements are considered major milestones for the network, which communicates with spacecraft all over the solar system using giant dish antennas located at three complexes around the globe.

Canberra’s fifth radio antenna, Deep Space Station 33, will be a 34 m-wide multifrequency beam-waveguide antenna. Buried mostly below ground, a massive concrete pedestal will house cutting-edge electronics and receivers in a climate-controlled room and provide a sturdy base for the reflector dish, which will rotate during operations on a steel platform called an alidade.

“As we look back on 60 years of incredible accomplishments at Canberra, the groundbreaking of a new antenna is a symbol for the next 60 years of scientific discovery,” said Kevin Coggins, Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, USA. “Building cutting-edge antennas is also a symbol of how the Deep Space Network embraces new technologies to enable the exploration of a growing fleet of space missions.”

When it goes online in 2029, the new Canberra dish will be the last of six parabolic dishes constructed under NASA’s Deep Space Network Aperture Enhancement Program, which is helping to support current and future spacecraft and the increased volume of data they provide. The network’s Madrid facility christened a new dish in 2022, and its facility in Goldstone, California, is putting the finishing touches on a new antenna.

Canberra’s role

The Deep Space Network was officially founded on 24 December 1963, when NASA’s early ground stations, including Goldstone, were connected to the new network control centre at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. Called the Space Flight Operations Facility, that building remains the centre through which data from the three global complexes flows.

The Madrid facility joined in 1964 and Canberra went online in 1965, going on to help support hundreds of missions, including the Apollo Moon landings.

“Canberra has played a crucial part in tracking, communicating and collecting data from some of the most momentous missions in space history,” said Kevin Ferguson, Director of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex. “As the network continues to advance and grow, Canberra will continue to play a key role in supporting humanity’s exploration of the cosmos.”

The Canberra complex joined the Deep Space Network on 19 March 1965, with one 26 m-wide radio antenna (which was decommissioned in 2000). Image credit: NASA.

By being spaced equidistant from one another around the globe, the complexes can provide continual coverage of spacecraft, no matter where they are in the solar system as Earth rotates. There is an exception, however: due to Canberra’s location in the Southern Hemisphere, it is the only one that can send commands to, and receive data from, Voyager 2 as it heads south almost 21 billion kilometres through interstellar space. More than 24 billion kilometres away, Voyager 1 sends its data down to the Madrid and Goldstone complexes, but it, too, can only receive commands via Canberra.

New technologies

In addition to constructing more antennas like Canberra’s Deep Space Station 33, NASA is looking to the future by also experimenting with laser, or optical, communications to enable significantly more data to flow to and from Earth. The Deep Space Network currently relies on radio frequencies to communicate, but laser operates at a higher frequency, allowing more data to be transmitted.

As part of that effort, NASA is flying the laser-based Deep Space Optical Communications experiment with the agency’s Psyche mission. Since its October 2023 launch, it has demonstrated high data rates over record-breaking distances and downlinked ultrahigh-definition streaming video from deep space.

“These new technologies have the potential to boost the science and exploration returns of missions travelling throughout the solar system,” said Amy Smith, Deputy Project Manager for the Deep Space Network at JPL, which manages the network. “Laser and radio communications could even be combined to build hybrid antennas, or dishes that can communicate using both radio and optical frequencies at the same time. That could be a game changer for NASA.”

Top image caption: The radio antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Communication Complex are located near the Australian capital. Image credit: NASA.