NASA’s Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex is tracking spacecraft again, three days after a wildfire forced its evacuation and passed through the site. The agency’s live Deep Space Network feed, which publishes what every dish in the network is pointed at, showed four of the Madrid complex’s six antennas carrying telemetry, tracking and command traffic on Monday afternoon: the 70-metre DSS-63 on the asteroid mission Psyche, DSS-65 on the ACE solar observatory, DSS-54 on WIND and DSS-56 on SOHO. The remaining two were in engineering upgrades and preventative maintenance.
The complex, at Robledo de Chavela roughly 40 miles west of Madrid, was evacuated on Friday 24 July. A NASA spokesperson told AFP that the wildfire “has passed through the MDSCC” and that all personnel had been safely evacuated, with damage to be assessed when it was safe to do so. The agency’s space communications division said it had “seamlessly transitioned support for mission operations to the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California, ensuring continuity of service and uninterrupted support for spacecraft communications”.
An inspection the following day found the damage was slight. Pavement and surrounding vegetation were affected, with no significant structural damage to the antennas or buildings. The European Space Agency’s nearby Cebreros station, a 35-metre dish about 77 kilometres west of Madrid, also appeared to have escaped harm, though safety restrictions prevented an on-site inspection.
Madrid is one of only three Deep Space Network complexes, alongside Goldstone in California and Canberra in Australia, spaced roughly 120 degrees apart in longitude so that at least one can always see a given spacecraft as the Earth turns. Between them they support more than 40 missions, including Artemis, the James Webb Space Telescope and both Voyager probes. Madrid holds one 70-metre dish and five 34-metre dishes.
The redundancy that absorbed this outage is less comfortable than it looks. The same live feed that shows Madrid back in service also shows Goldstone’s 70-metre DSS-14 in engineering upgrades — the dish is out of action into 2028 while repairs costed at between $4.1 million and $4.6 million are combined with planned work. The 70-metre antennas are the ones that carry the faintest signals, which is why Canberra’s DSS-43 does most of the talking to Voyager. On Monday, Canberra’s DSS-34 and DSS-35 were tracking Voyager 2, DSS-43 was on Europa Clipper and DSS-36 was on Webb.
No outlet reached by this publication established the name, size or containment status of the fire that reached the complex. It burned during the same weekend in which Spain declared a state of emergency and evacuated tens of thousands of people from the Madrid and Ávila regions, and in which the EU’s satellite fire service recorded Spain at more than twice its twenty-year average burnt area.
The restoration itself has not been announced. It is visible because the Deep Space Network publishes its own operational status continuously, dish by dish and spacecraft by spacecraft — which makes a machine-readable feed the fastest way to learn that one of three windows on the solar system is open again.