LOGO ESA European Space Agency, Photo: ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) inaugurated on Saturday in Australia a fourth antenna for the distant space, meant to improve communications with its missions in the solar system, AFP informs.
The new antenna, with a diameter of 35 meters, is installed on the site of the terrestrial station in New Norcea, in Australia, which already had an antenna of this type. Two others currently operate in Argentina and Spain. These installations are able to receive communications from very long distances, from the depth of the solar system.
The antenna has the role of supporting the current and future scientific missions of ESA: the Euclid space telescope, the Hera mission on the way to the asroid didymos, the Bepicolombo mission that studies Mercury or the Juice probe, which is to enter Jupiter's orbit.
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“Without a network of ground stations to communicate with space vehicles, exploration, space science would not be possible,” said Simon Plum, head of the Missions Department of ESE.
“Whether it is in the terrestrial orbit, in the Lagrange (stable areas of the solar system used to place the observation instruments), per month or further in the solar system, we could not operate satellites without these infrastructures,” he explained.
Since the inauguration of the first such antenna, in 1998, the volume of data transmitted from and to the space vehicles has increased considerably.
“Everything is becoming more and more avid of data. Our useful tasks and our instruments have become more advanced, and the number of missions increases,” said Mehran Sarkrati, the head of the ESSA ENSA stations engineering, specifying that the construction of a fifth antenna is already in the project.
Like the other three antennas for ESA's distant space, the new infrastructure will be able to communicate with vehicles over 2 million kilometers of land, on frequency bands X, K and KA.
Several its components are cryogenic cooled to about -263 degrees Celsius, close to zero absolute, in order to detect the extremely weak signals sent by very long distances.
