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Artemis 1 moon mission squeezing communications with James Webb Space Telescope - Space.com
Dec 03, 2022 1 min, 17 secs

Two major NASA missions that have launched in the past year are revealing a communications weakness in space.

NASA communicates with all of its distant spacecraft — from the Orion capsule to the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) to Voyager 1 — through the Deep Space Network, a collection of 14 antennas located at three sites in California, Spain and Australia.

"We were told over the summer that when the Artemis space mission launched, the Deep Space Network was going to be basically fully taken by Artemis because they needed to keep track of the spaceship," Mercedes López-Morales, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the chair of the JWST Users Committee, told a meeting of the U.S.

While Orion is in flight and beyond low Earth orbit, it's in near-constant contact with the Deep Space Network — a major drain that has put the James Webb Space Telescope and other missions in the backseat.

NASA has known Artemis would strain the Deep Space Network; the agency arranged upgrades to some antennas and added two new ones in January 2021 and March 2022 in preparation.

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For Artemis 1, she said, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, which operates both JWST and the Hubble Space Telescope, rejiggered JWST's observing schedule!

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