New Next-Gen Dish Adds Muscle to NASA’s Deep Space Network

Antennas soak in the summer Sun in August 2026 at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, including the recently completed Deep Space Station 23 (shown in the foreground, to the right).

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Deep Space Network facility in California is marking the addition of a brand new 34-meter-wide (114-foot-wide) radio frequency antenna to the agency’s deep space communications and navigation system. The network uses giant dish antennas located at three global facilities to support more than 40 spacecraft exploring the solar system and interstellar space.

The new Deep Space Station 23 (DSS-23) is located at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, near Barstow, and is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

NASA leadership and personnel as well as dignitaries gathered at the complete DSS-23 antenna for a ceremonial ribbon cutting. It’s the latest to be added as part of the Deep Space Network’s Aperture Enhancement Project, which began in 2009 to upgrade and expand the network by adding six new 34-meter multifrequency beam-waveguide antennas. These versatile dishes can enhance many missions operating over different radio frequencies.

“By expanding the Deep Space Network, we are strengthening the communications foundation NASA needs for the bold missions ahead — from exploring more of the Moon than ever before to peering deeper into the solar system,” said James Kenyon, associate administrator of the Research and Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This new antenna will help us deliver on our national goals for space exploration and push beyond the limits of what once seemed impossible.”

After completing a testing campaign from May through July to demonstrate its capabilities, the new DSS-23 began operations on Aug. 3, tracking NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Since then, it has been communicating with dozens of missions such as NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Psyche, Juno, Voyager 1, and other robotic spacecraft in deep space.

“The addition of this next-generation antenna brings us closer to a completely modernized network that embraces advanced technology to ensure NASA’s leadership in deep space communications,” said Dave Gallagher, director of JPL. “After over 60 years of continuous operations supporting consequential missions, these upgrades prime the network for a new era of exploration. The teams that designed, planned, and built DSS-23 should be proud.”

Enhanced capabilities

Construction of DSS-23 began in February 2020. After the 133-ton metal reflector framework was placed and bolted atop the antenna’s pedestal in December 2024, engineers installed the panels to the framework that reflect radio frequency signals transmitted to and received from spacecraft. Then came the careful process of calibrating the antenna so it can work in concert with the rest of the network.

It is the fifth antenna at Goldstone (joining three 34-meter antennas and one 70-meter, or 230-foot, antenna) and the fifth enhancement project antenna to join the network, which includes antennas at the DSN’s Goldstone, Madrid, and Canberra, Australia, complexes. Multifrequency beam waveguide antennas direct signals down to a stable, climate-controlled underground room, rather than housing heavy, sensitive electronic equipment on the moving antenna dish. In addition to offering versatility, this design allows easy access for maintenance and upgrades to the system.

“The biggest challenge wasn’t actually constructing the antenna. It was transforming a complex collection of mechanical, electrical, software, radio frequency, and infrastructure systems into a single, mission-ready asset,” said Germaine Aziz, manager of the Deep Space Network Aperture Enhancement Project at JPL. “Every subsystem must be integrated, calibrated, and verified to operate with extraordinary precision and reliability before it can support NASA’s deep space missions.”

The enhancement project will be complete when a sixth enhancement-project antenna, Deep Space Station 33, comes online at the Canberra facility in 2029, bringing the total number of 34-meter antennas across the network to 13. The 34-meter antennas can be arrayed (combined and operated together) to provide an equivalent communications backup for each facility’s single 70-meter antenna, which, after more than 50 years of near-continuous operation, are getting increasingly costly to maintain and repair.

Managed by Caltech for NASA, JPL manages the agency’s Deep Space Network with the oversight of NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program within NASA’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate. More than 100 NASA and non-NASA missions rely on the Deep Space Network and Near Space Network. They include missions that support astronauts aboard the International Space Station and future Artemis missions, monitoring Earth, exploring the Moon, and exploring the solar system and beyond. 

For more information about the Deep Space Network, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/communicating-with-missions/dsn 

Source: New Next-Gen Dish Adds Muscle to NASA’s Deep Space Network - NASA 

Nature Invented Biodegradable Plastic Long Before We Did, And Animals Have Been Eating It for Millions of Years

We tend to think of “bioplastic” as a modern invention, something engineered in a lab to solve a very human problem. It turns out microbes got there first, by a few hundred million years.

Many bacteria and archaea produce natural biodegradable compounds called polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs, storing them inside their cells as reserves of carbon and energy, nature’s own version of a pantry. Scientists have long assumed only microorganisms themselves had the enzymes needed to break these compounds back down. A new study from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen just overturned that assumption.

The discovery started with an unusual creature: a two-centimeter marine worm called Olavius algarvensis that has no mouth and no gut. Instead, it survives entirely by farming bacteria beneath its skin and digesting them directly. One of those bacterial symbionts turned out to store an extraordinary amount of PHA, up to 42% of its cellular carbon. Researchers wondered whether the worm had evolved a way to tap into that reserve.

It had. The team identified an enzyme in the worm, a PHA depolymerase, that breaks the bioplastic down into molecules the worm can actually use, and found it was produced in exactly the spot where the worm digests its bacterial tenants.

Once they knew what to look for, the researchers found similar enzymes across a surprisingly wide range of animals, marine worms, starfish, and land-dwelling species like earthworms. That points to a previously invisible pathway: a way for carbon stored by microbes to move directly into animal food webs, something researchers had assumed simply wasn’t accessible to animals at all.

As co-author Maggie Sogin, now at UC Merced, put it: animals have probably been feeding on this natural bioplastic for hundreds of millions of years, we’re only discovering it now.

The finding has a practical edge, too. PHAs are increasingly manufactured as an eco-friendly alternative to conventional plastics, used in everything from food packaging to slow-release agricultural fertilizers. Understanding exactly how — and how fast — these materials break down in real ecosystems, animals included, matters for figuring out whether they really live up to their “biodegradable” promise in practice.

Original paper: Zeidler et al. (2026), Animal degradation of microbial storage polyhydroxyalkanoates, Nature Ecology & Evolution. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-026-03153-8 

Source: Nature Invented Biodegradable Plastic Long Before We Did, And Animals Have Been Eating It for Millions of Years