The forerunner of the DSN was established in January 1958, when
JPL, then under contract to the
US Army, deployed portable radio tracking stations in Nigeria, Singapore, and California to receive
telemetry and plot the orbit of the Army-launched
Explorer 1, the first successful US
satellite.
NASA was officially established on October 1, 1958, to consolidate the separately developing space-exploration programs of the US Army,
US Navy, and
US Air Force into one civilian organization. On December 3, 1958, JPL was transferred from the US Army to NASA and given responsibility for the design and execution of lunar and planetary exploration programs using remotely controlled spacecraft. Shortly after the transfer, NASA established the concept of the Deep Space Network as a separately managed and operated communications system that would accommodate all
deep space missions, thereby avoiding the need for each flight project to acquire and operate its own specialized space communications network. The DSN was given responsibility for its own research, development, and operation in support of all of its users. Under this concept, it has become a world leader in the development of low-noise receivers; large parabolic-dish antennas; tracking, telemetry, and command systems; digital signal processing; and deep space navigation. The Deep Space Network formally announced its intention to send missions into deep space on Christmas Eve 1963; it has remained in continuous operation in one capacity or another ever since. The largest antennas of the DSN are often called on during spacecraft emergencies. Almost all spacecraft are designed so normal operation can be conducted on the smaller (and more economical) antennas of the DSN, but during an emergency the use of the largest antennas is crucial. This is because a troubled spacecraft may be forced to use less than its normal transmitter power,
attitude control problems may preclude the use of
high-gain antennas, and recovering every bit of telemetry is critical to assessing the health of the spacecraft and planning the recovery. The most famous example is the
Apollo 13 mission, where limited battery power and inability to use the spacecraft's high-gain antennas reduced signal levels below the capability of the
Manned Space Flight Network, and the use of the biggest DSN antennas (and the Australian
Parkes Observatory radio telescope) was critical to saving the lives of the astronauts. While Apollo was also a US mission, DSN provides this emergency service to other space agencies as well, in a spirit of inter-agency and international cooperation. For example, the
recovery of the
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission of the
European Space Agency (ESA) would not have been possible without the use of the largest DSN facilities.
DSN and the Apollo program Although normally tasked with tracking uncrewed spacecraft, the Deep Space Network (DSN) also contributed to the communication and tracking of
Apollo missions to the
Moon, although primary responsibility was held by the
Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN). The DSN designed the MSFN stations for lunar communication and provided a second antenna at each MSFN site (the MSFN sites were near the DSN sites for just this reason). Two antennas at each site were needed both for redundancy and because the beam widths of the large antennas needed were too small to encompass both the lunar orbiter and the lander at the same time. DSN also supplied some larger antennas as needed, in particular for television broadcasts from the Moon, and emergency communications such as Apollo 13. Excerpt from a NASA report describing how the DSN and MSFN cooperated for Apollo: The details of this cooperation and operation are available in a two-volume technical report from JPL. == Management ==