ESA’s boosting its radio dish in Argentina to receive signals from deep space
As more and more scientific data is being sent from missions exploring deep in our Solar System, ESA’s radio dish in Argentina has seen high-tech improvements.
Since 2012, ESA’s deep-space tracking station at Malargüe, about 1200 km west of Buenos Aires, Argentina, has provided critical links to some of Europe’s most important missions, including ExoMars, Mars Express, Gaia and Rosetta. But each decade there’s a 10-fold growth in the amount of science data that must be downlinked from Mercury, the surface of Mars or the enigmatic moons circling Jupiter.
According to a press release, to cater for this need, ESA is investing in a series of significant upgrades for its Malargüe station, underscoring the Agency’s long and productive partnership with Argentina and that country’s strong involvement in space science. The upgrades will be spread over two years and include a new main signal-processing system and the addition of a 26 GHz downlink that will enable high-speed data receipt from space.
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The 18 months of work, valued at about €4 million, will start in May.
“This means our station at Malargüe will be able to download data from ESA’s future Euclid mission, for example, at 150 Mbit/s, 15 times faster than today. It will also support cornerstone ESA missions like ExoMars 2020, BepiColombo and Juice, as well as partner missions from Russia, the US and Japan, among others,” Michel Dugast, ESA’s station engineer and project manager for the upgrade, said.
ESA is also using the Malargüe dish this year to catch signals from the international Cassini spacecraft operated by NASA at Saturn, more than 1.4 billion km away, some of the most-distant radio link-ups ever achieved by European stations.
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