At Telespazio’s Fucino Space Centre, BTS-1 and BTS-2 antennas are ready to support the first step in the return to the Moon, the Artemis I mission, which will be launched on 16 November from Cape Canaveral's Kennedy Space Center.
At Fucino, two antennas measuring approximately eleven metres in diameter will receive radio signals from the Orion capsule in real time as it travels to a distance of 448,000 km from Earth, helping track its trajectory.
The data collected at the Space Centre will then be shared with NASA via the ASINET mission communications infrastructure, in which Telespazio is one of the principal industrial partners, demonstrating its ability to support tracking of future space exploration missions to the Moon and, in the future, Mars.
Under the Artemis programme, with the participation of NASA and numerous other space agencies such as ESA and ASI, this initial unmanned mission will be validating procedures, systems and infrastructure for the first human flight, currently scheduled for 2024.
Aerial view of Telespazio's Fucino space centre
With 170 antennas in a 370,000 square metre area, the Fucino Space Centre in Abruzzo is acknowledged as the world’s first and most important teleport for civil use, hosting in-orbit control of satellites and telecommunication, television and multimedia services.
What’s more, Fucino has historic ties with the Moon. In 1969 the Centre received and retransmitted images of the moon landing during the Apollo 11 mission, bringing this historic moment into Italians’ homes with a live television broadcast.
And that’s not all: Telespazio coordinated a Phase A/B1 study for definition of the Moonlight mission and infrastructure: the European Space Agency’s initiative guaranteeing communication and navigation services for future missions to the moon. In the vision of the consortium led by Telespazio, the Moonlight infrastructure will be composed of three ground stations distributed over the globe and a satellite constellation, with Fucino playing the essential role of mission control and connection with all the economic operators involved, all over the world.