Live · NASA DSN
Every robot humanity has sent into deep space phones home through the same three sets of giant dish antennas — in California, Spain and Australia. This is who they're listening to right now: the spacecraft, the signal, and how long its whisper took to cross the void.
The network's three complexes sit roughly 120° apart around the planet — Goldstone in the Mojave Desert, Madrid in Spain, and Canberra in Australia. As the Earth turns, a spacecraft setting below the horizon at one station is rising into view at the next, so there is always at least one antenna able to reach into deep space. Hand-offs between them keep a continuous thread open to missions billions of kilometres away.
By the time a signal from the outer solar system reaches Earth it is staggeringly faint — Voyager 1's transmitter puts out about as much power as a fridge bulb, smeared across 24 billion kilometres. The 70-metre dishes catch a sliver of that, an amount of power measured in billionths of a billionth of a watt, and pull a signal out of the noise.
And nothing is instant. A command to a Mars rover takes minutes to arrive; to Voyager, about a day each way. The round-trip light time shown above is that delay made visible — every conversation with deep space is held across a gulf of hours.
Ground stations
3 complexes
California · Spain · Australia, ~120° apart
Biggest antenna
70 metres
Wider than a football pitch
On the air since
1963
Run by NASA/JPL, never off
Farthest contact
Voyager 1
24+ billion km · ~23 h one-way