NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Applied Aerospace Structures Corporation

Thales Alenia Space

These systems will allow communication between the spacecraft and control centers on Earth, one million miles apart.

Communications

The dual-band HGA accommodates S-band (2 GHz) uplink/downlink data for commands and housekeeping telemetry and Ka-band (26 GHz) high-speed downlink data for science. With the use of pointing hardware called gimbals, the HGA can move in multiple directions to accurately point at ground stations.

High-Gain Antenna (HGA)

The RF communications electronics are located underneath the spacecraft bus on the communications panel. The Ka-band transmitter is responsible for ingesting the high-speed science data from the science data recorder (SDR) and preparing the data for downlink to the ground station. The traveling wave tube amplifier provides very high output power for transmission to the ground through the High Gain Antenna. The science downlink can accommodate data rates up to 500 megabits per second.