Local students assist UK Astronaut Tim Peake in opening Goonhilly’s Deep Space Antenna

Ribbon Cutting Ghy6 Antenna
Ghy6 Outside view

11th June 2021

In Feb 2018, a project was announced to upgrade Goonhilly’s largest antenna to deep-space tracking and satellite communication services on a commercial basis. This £8.4 million (€9.5 million) investment at Goonhilly in Cornwall, South West England, was supported by the Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and by UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency (ESA).

The project delivery has been successful and the upgrade has now been completed and has created the world’s first commercial deep-space communications station, capable of tracking future missions to the Moon and Mars. 

The antenna has completed months of testing with ESA’s Mars Express, which saw the first transmissions to Mars from UK soil, and the first anywhere in the world by a privately owned company and today, a group of local Cornish science students officially opened the antenna with the assistance of the first British ESA astronaut Tim Peake. 

Matt Cosby, Chief Technology Officer at Goonhilly said “Goonhilly has built an incredible team to complete the upgrade over the last 3 years. Working closely with the European Space Agency the project involved a refurbishment of the Antenna replacing the motors, gearboxes and thousands of bolts on the structure. The complete workings of the communications system has been completely replaced to allow us to seamlessly connect to ESA’s control centre, where they are able to send commands to Mars and receive their data from the spacecraft.” 

Pier Bargellini, Head of the Ground Facilities Operations Division at European Space Agency said “As Goonhilly’s antenna transitions from qualification to operation, we look forward to more of our missions using the system. This asset offers the European Space Agency an effective method of increasing our data download capacity and is a step closer to European industry offering commercial deep space services
.” 

Photo of scientists tracking Mars spacecraft
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