The Artemis 1 moon mission tightens communications with JWST
Two major NASA missions launched in the past year are revealing a communications weakness in space.
NASA communicates with all its distant spacecraft, from the Orion capsule to the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) a Voyager 1 — through the Deep Space Network, a collection of 14 antennas located at three sites in California, Spain and Australia. But the network is busy, and ensuring that every mission beyond land orbit has the communications time it needs can be complicated, a problem that the Artemis 1 mission has escalated.
“We were told over the summer that when the Artemis space mission launched, the Deep Space Network would basically be completely occupied by Artemis because they had to track the spacecraft,” Mercedes López-Morales, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian. Center for Astrophysics and the chair of the JWST User Committee, he told a meeting of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the US National Academies of Sciences on Wednesday (Nov. 30).
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The time came on November 16, when NASA launched Artemis 1. A test flight to begin the agency’s return to the Moon, the 25-day mission sent an unmanned Orion capsule into lunar orbit and is scheduled to blast off Earth on Dec. 11.
While Orion is in flight and beyond low-Earth orbit, it is in near-constant contact with the deep space web, a major drain that has put the James Webb Space Telescope and other missions on the backseat. NASA has learned that Artemis would strain the deep space network; the agency arranged for upgrades to some antennas and added two new ones January 2021 i March 2022 in preparation
But communication time is still scarce. “It could go up to 80 hours, that’s about three and a half days, without any contact with JWST,” Lopez-Morales said he was told before Artemis 1 launched.
JWST scientists typically send commands to the $10 billion observatory about once a week, he told the board, so the infrequent communications don’t affect the observatory’s ability to receive its instructions. But for astronomers to really enjoy Webb’s power, the telescope must be able to transmit its data home, and do so before its computer fills up.
“The big problem is that you can’t download data for so long,” Lopez-Morales said.
For Artemis 1, he said, the Maryland Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates both JWST and the Hubble Space Telescope, modified the JWST observing schedule. Scientists prioritized shorter observations, which create smaller batches of data, to reduce the chances of the telescope’s computer filling up before the deep space network can accept the next batch of data.
But as NASA plans additional Artemis launches — and those with humans on board — in 2024 and beyond, scientists want a different solution to the communications jam.
“We’re desperately asking NASA to come up with a plan to somehow get more access to the antennas,” Lopez-Morales said.
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