On March 19, 2025, the 60th anniversary of the commissioning of NASA’s Deep Space Communications Antenna Complex in Canberra, Australia, it was announced that the complex would be expanded with a new state-of-the-art parabolic antenna—the sixth in a new generation of antennas. The commissioning of the new installation will expand the communications channel and coverage area for work with deep space missions and beyond—an investment in the future whose importance cannot be overstated.
Three NASA sites for deep space communications: USA, Australia, Spain. Image source: NASA
The agency has three deep space network (DSN) sites distributed evenly across the Earth, allowing most space missions to remain in constant communication regardless of the planet’s rotation.
The Deep Space Network was officially launched on December 24, 1963, when NASA’s first ground stations, including the Goldstone facility in California’s Mojave Desert, were linked to the network’s new control center at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. A similar center in Madrid joined the project in 1964, and one in Canberra was launched in 1965, helping support hundreds of missions, including the Apollo moon landings.
There are four DSN dish antennas operating in Canberra. The new facility, Deep Space Station 33, will be a multi-frequency waveguide antenna with a reflector 34 metres in diameter. The massive concrete plinth, located mostly underground, will house cutting-edge electronics and receivers in a climate-controlled environment. The antenna will be operational in 2029 and will be the sixth of NASA’s new Deep Space Network Aperture Enhancement antennas. A fifth antenna is being prepared for delivery in the US at the Goldstone facility, and a fourth was commissioned in Madrid in 2022.
Antenna complex in Canberra, Australia
A unique feature of the Canberra complex is that it is the only place where commands can be transmitted to the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, which are more than 20 billion km away from Earth. Moreover, only from Canberra can data be received and transmitted from Voyager 2. It is possible that after 2029, communication with this device will be possible only thanks to a new antenna, the construction of which has just begun.