A Day in the Life of a Deep Space Network Operator

Meet Beth Sheppard: one of our Deep Space Network Mission Operations Engineers.
Beth spends her time communicating with spacecraft as far away as the Moon and Mars, from right here at Goonhilly. Want to know what that looks like day to day?
Join us for the next episode of 60 Minutes Inside Goonhilly....

[@goonhillyearthstationltd1242]

Does this look like your dream job?? Head to www.goonhilly.org/careers to find out more about our job openings and to apply! 📡

[@philgreen815]

What a fascinating job you have, I am insanely jealous! Is there any possibility that members of the public can have a look around the facility? I would dearly like to visit if this is possible.

[@patchvonbraun]

Working on restoration of a 12.8m dish mostly for radio astronomy but also for lunar space missions in the future.

[@Drew_TheRoadLessTraveled]

Awesome video of the control rooms. I recently took a trip to Womera-rocket range South Australia. Looking at the old tech it is a wonder they could track anything. I use TinyGS to track over-head orbits in South Australia.

[@AECRADIO1]

X-BAND: 10GHZ. S-BAND: 2.4 GHZ Bands are approximate..not locked on that center frequency, they go above and below each.

[@stevemumbling7720]

Would have been good to hear the output power of the HPAs and the corresponding ERP from the dish on the different bands.

[@philliberatore4265]

The term " customers " referring to the end users kind of surprise me. Of course it makes perfect sense, I just never thought of it that way. A very cool video. Thanks!

[@tedydjajawinata2480]

I would be very excited to work at such facility. Btw, as high tech as the facility is, it's amazing to see her using traditional paper to do the checklist. I would imagine they'd use a tablet 😁

[@Hiram8866]

Very interesting. Thanks for posting.

[@skywatcherca]

What frequencies (what bands) are you able to receive? Thanks, very interesting.

[@VK3CSJ]

Thank you...very interesting, would've been nice to hear more tecky stuff, but still, didn't know about Goonhilly until now...Cheers...;)

[@KeritechElectronics]

Lots of nice tech there - reminds me CuriousMarc's trip to an Apollo era satellite dish.

[@DesertVox]

I didn't know that there are 'customers' other than government agencies like NASA that would send spacecraft into deep space. Could you elaborate more on the type of customers you have, and what type of spacecraft and missions that they have?

[@goonhillyearthstationltd1242]

Here's an example of a private mission (to the Moon) we're tracking right now: ispace-inc.com/m1

[@_TeXoN_]

ESA sometimes books this antenna for Cluster II or Mars Express. NASA rarely books this antenna for example for the Cubesats onboard Artemis 1. Then there often is the case that other companies and Space Agencies book ESTRACK as a single groundstation network provider, but because of capacity issues they partially also get Goonhilly. This would be the case for iSpace Hakuto-R or ISRO Aditya-L1.

[@gameplych]

Cool !

[@vishalraj9832]

Mst🔥

[@stocksj]

What type of OS are you running your workstations on? Windows or Linux? Also do you use a custom monitoring/tracking Software or a commercial satellite tracking program? Thx

[@aanset1]

very nice site...

[@alexlandherr]

The green clock shows UTC, why then use the GMT time zone on the ground track map?

[@MoisesCaster]

Do these antennas communicate with the voyager probes too?

[@harryturnbull1884]

Where is Goonhilly? Is is it near Wessex?

[@andresdandler7919]

Very interesting! I have some questions related to scheduling: Each antenna is obviously only pointing in one direction at a time. What if a spacecraft sends a signal at a time when no dish is pointing at it? Also, how often do you move each antenna? How long does it take to download or upload each communication to a spacecraft? Thanks!

[@_TeXoN_]

You upload a schedule for the next few days onto the spacecraft, so the spacecraft knows in advance when to transmit. Every Telemetry get acknowledged, so when the spacecraft does not get a response, it will keep the data for next time. In deep space each contact lasts typically 4-8 hours. Goonhilly is not booked that often, so I would guess that they often get only one pass per day, but sometimes for example during the launch of Artemis 1 their schedule could be booked more than half of the time.

[@StringerNews1]

Fascinating! Can the antenna send signals to Uranus?

[@skywatcherca]

Forgot to ask - how large is the dish? Thank you.

[@JigilJigil]

1:25 its all SpaceX Starlink sats.

[@Hal_McKinney]

How accurately can you determine the speed of a craft & how exactly? (Can you show the math?) Thanks 😊

[@Katyt-ho1uo]

Can we not use time and distance?even for space craft still speed=distance /time .

[@alzeNL]

whats with the bloody irritiating music, its such an excellent opputnity to hear from the people that work there, why ruin it with music - ok some intro/exit music, but constant crappy music, its very annoying.

[@matthews4159]

. the latest electronics .. and she is using paper & pencil clip board.. ???

[@bigdan8936]

aquisition of signal, goonhilly

[@tejashwisaurav53]

Cute girl ❤

[@maximustitan8171]

Get a PHD they say. This is actualy work compare to Twitter one. lol

[@khimroy3958]

Say "Hi" ! to Aliens 👽😄🖐

[@chaseshadow]

A day in the life of a LIAR - Bound to the secrecy act. Satellites 😂when 'Space Crafts' go behind the horizon 😆

[@AECRADIO1]

PLEASE DO NOT ADMIT YOU ARE A FLERF (Flat Earth)..

[@chaseshadow]

@@AECRADIO1 How the mind works in it's infinite wisdom. The only person to mention said subject is yourself. Bait loading we refer to.

[@Ethan_Roberts]

They're not a liar just because you're too ignorant to grasp the basic concept of how this works.

[@chaseshadow]

@@Ethan_Roberts When you're my age you 'Should' have realised a lot. You live a complete lie. I've forgotten what you know sunshine.

[@Ethan_Roberts]

@@chaseshadow it's all such a lie that even I am able to see and photograph the spacecraft these people are able to communicate with. I have many pictures of various satellites like Starlink and the ISS. If your age is old, I would've expected you to be wiser than you currently appear, maybe take your own advice.

[@dano612s]

this is so dang cool. only 285 subscribers 🥲