NASA officials sounded an alarm Tuesday about the agency's Deep Space Network, a collection of antennas in California, Spain, and Australia used to maintain contact with missions scattered across the Solar System.
Vint Cerf, an Internet pioneer who is now an executive at Google, sits on the committee Dodd met with Tuesday.
After hearing from Dodd and other NASA managers, Cerf said: "The deep space communications system is in deep—well, let me use a better word, deficit.
“We have reached a really critical point on the DSN’s aging infrastructure," said Sandra Cauffman, deputy director of NASA's astrophysics division.
During the Artemis I mission, NASA's Orion spacecraft spent about 25 days traveling from Earth to a distant orbit around the Moon, then returned to a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
The Deep Space Network's antennas collectively spent 903 hours tracking and communicating with the Orion spacecraft during Artemis I.
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