The three new Lunar Exploration Landing Sites (LEGS) will significantly improve the quality of the Near Space Network’s communications services and will be a key enabler for NASA’s Artemis campaign. NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program maintains the agency’s two primary communications networks: the Deep Space Network and the Near Space Network. These networks use antennas around the world to capture signals from satellites, collect data, and track missions, allowing satellites to send data back to Earth for research and exploration. They have already proven their effectiveness by supporting the first Artemis mission during its 25-day journey around the Moon, and they will do the same for the upcoming Artemis II mission.

As part of NASA’s Luna-Mars initiative, the agency added three new LEGS antennas to its Near Space Network. These antennas will directly support subsequent Artemis missions and ancillary missions such as the Human Landing System, Lunar Rover, and Gateway Station.

“One of the main goals of LEGS is to free up the Deep Space Network. The Near Space Network and new LEGS antennas will focus on lunar missions and allow the Deep Space Network to support missions further into the Solar System, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Voyager interstellar missions,” said TJ Cros LEGS of the Space Center. NASA’s Goddard Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The Near Space Network provides communications and navigation services for missions anywhere in the Sun-Earth system, including the Moon and Lagrange Points 1 and 2, up to 1.2 million miles from Earth. The 66-foot-diameter LEGS antennas will be strategically placed around the world to provide uninterrupted support for lunar operations. As the satellite orbits the Moon, it encodes its data into a radio frequency signal, which is then transmitted to the LEGS antenna. This data is sent to mission operators and scientists around the world who use the science data to make decisions about the spacecraft’s status and orbit or to make discoveries.

The LEGS antennas will be highly flexible for users by implementing a “dual-band approach” for the antennas, which will allow missions to communicate using two different radio frequency bands (X-band and Ka-band). Additional LEGS capacity will be requested from commercial service providers and will include a “tri-band approach” for antennas using S-band in addition to X and Ka bands.

The first ground station, LEGS-1, is located at NASA’s White Sands complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The LEGS-2 antenna will be located in Mathiesfontein, South Africa, near Cape Town, in partnership with SANSA, the South African National Space Agency. For LEGS-3, NASA is examining sites in Western Australia. These stations will complement existing near- and far-field network capabilities and provide more reliable communications services for Artemis.