L
Leovinus
Guest
<p>There are three big antennas in the Deep Space Network: one in Californa, one in Spain, and one in Australia. These provide the ability to talk to any probe any time because they are 1/3 of the way around the world from each other. </p><p>I was wondering what the impact would be if we lost one of those antennas through hardware failure, natural disasters, or other imaginable events.</p><p>My theory is that it wouldn't be catastrophic: There are lots of probes out there and each dish can only point to one at a time. Therefore, there must be lots of times when any particular probe has no dish pointing to it at all. </p><p>I think the worst that would happen is that we needed the broken dish right at a critical time (such as a landing on Mars) and we'd miss the signals.</p><p>I think it might be a good idea to add more dishes to the Deep Space Network in new locations. </p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>