Deep Space Network - Goldstone

  Goldstone, California, USA

Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex is located on Fort Irwin Military Reservation in the Mojave Desert, just south of the mountains bordering Death Valley, 50 kilometers north of Barstow.  Microwave radio transmitter-receivers are scattered across a 137-square-kilometer region surrounding Goldstone dry lake bed, west of Fort Irwin's developed area.  The land is leased from the US Army by NASA.

Goldstone is the first and largest of three facilities which comprise the Deep Space Network (DSN).  The other two are near Canberra, Australia and Madrid, Spain.  They are approximately 120° apart around the globe to permit continuous communication with spacecraft in deep Space.  All are in semi-mountainous, bowl-shaped terrain to shield against radio frequency interference.

DSS-14 "Mars" is 70 meters in diameter, the largest at Goldstone.  It was originally built to 64 m for the Mariner 4 Mars mission, and enlarged in 1988.

In addition to communicating with deep Space probes, the antennas are used for radio astronomy and radar mapping of planets and asteroids.  Some of the smaller antennas are used to communicate with spacecraft in Earth orbit, including the Space Shuttle and ISS.

More text here.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Pasadena, CA

JPL website
DSN website

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Jeff Root
February 5, 2005