A 230-foot antenna at the Canberra, Australia site of the Deep Space Network

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s ability to communicate with its distant spacecraft is in jeopardy. We send commands to spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit and receive data from them using the Deep Space Network (DSN), which consists of three enormous sets of radio antennae: one in California, one in Spain and one in Australia. A wildfire has consumed the area around the radio dishes in Spain, and the level of damage to the facility itself is not yet clear.

Wildfires have been raging across Europe all month, driven by a heat wave and intense droughts. On 24 July, a fire near Madrid intensified and burned through the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex (MDSCC) in the town of Robledo de Chavela. This is “the worst fire in the history of the region”, said Madrid’s regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and Robledo and surrounding areas were evacuated.

According to a statement from NASA, all employees at MDSCC were able to evacuate safely, but the antennae themselves have not been evaluated yet. “Any potential damage will be assessed when it is safe to do so,” the statement reads.

Damage to the dishes in Spain could be disastrous for NASA. The DSN is already drastically oversubscribed, which slows down the process of getting commands to spacecraft and data back down from them. With one dish out of commission, this problem could get even worse – and with the Artemis lunar programme just ramping up, demand is only going to increase. If the oversubscription gets severe enough, it’s possible that some data will never make it back to Earth. 

The other problem comes from the way the three stations of the DSN are set up. “These stations are designed to cover about a third of the sky, such that at any given time we can use two to track and communicate with spacecraft way out beyond Earth’s orbit,” says Paul Byrne at Washington University in Missouri. “As a function of geometry, there will now be times of the day when certain spacecraft are out of touch when they otherwise wouldn’t have been.” That is particularly a problem for extremely distant spacecraft, such as Voyager 1 and 2. 

According to the NASA statement, for the time being, “the agency has seamlessly transitioned support for mission operations to the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California, ensuring continuity of service and uninterrupted support for spacecraft communications”.

That is a temporary bandage on the problem, though, and it is inevitable that if MDSCC were damaged, there would be effects on spacecraft. “This isn’t great,” says Byrne.