In article ,
John Stoffel wrote:
Now I agree that DSN should be upgraded, but how? Are lasers
effective over interplanetary distances yet? Or something in the IR
range would be better? I dunno...

DSN has been thinking about optical communications (most likely in the
near IR rather than the visible) for a long time, and has done some
deep-space experiments (e.g., firing Messenger's lidar at Earth), but it
would be a big change.

The two really big snags are that the spacecraft transmitter would have to
be pointed very precisely indeed -- you pay a price for that much-narrower
beam! -- and you would need several more DSN sites because any single site
may be clouded over at a critical time.

The #1 way to upgrade DSN is just to build more antenna dishes to roughly
the existing designs. It's the *dishes*, not the radio frequencies, which
are being saturated with traffic.

It would also be very helpful to have a second southern-hemisphere DSN
site, perhaps in South America. Having only one can become a severe
bottleneck when busy parts of the solar system are in the southern sky.
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