When this occurs, engineers ask the antenna to ‘drop lock’ and the hunt for the spacecraft continues.Įngineers occasionally need to conduct system tests with an antenna or its subsystems. For example, attempts to recover the Opportunity Rover (MERB) may appear successful when the antenna has actually locked on to a signal from one of the orbiters around Mars such as MAVEN or MRO. This is particularly common with spacecraft at Mars as multiple spacecraft are within the field of view of a single DSN antenna. While the ground station is searching for a signal, it may ‘lock on’ to a signal from a different spacecraft and wrongly identify it as the spacecraft being searched for. In off-nominal scenarios when a project may be attempting to recover a spacecraft that is in safe mode or experiencing other operational challenges, an antenna may wrongly report that is receiving data from the spacecraft in question. If all the antenna of one or more of the three complexes are showing no activity it may be a ‘global downtime’ maintenance activity or a temporary glitch in the pipeline of data to DSN Now. It is not referencing a schedule of planned communication sessions. DSN Now is driven by real-time data provided by the ground stations of the Deep Space Network and is updated every 5 seconds.

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