Adam Gannon Looks to the Stars with a NASA Deep Space Network Communications-Tracking Frame

NASA researcher Adam Gannon has brought a little bit of his work home — by building a Raspberry Pi-powered piece of wall art which provides real-time notification when space-faring craft are in communication with NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN).

"I’ve been working quite a while on a piece to hang up on my wall that displays — in real time — which spacecraft are communicating with NASA's Deep Space Network," Gannon explains. "As part of my job in the space communications field, I sometimes interact with […] DSN. Headquartered at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California with major ground station sites in Spain and Australia, the DSN is responsible for communication with dozens of spacecraft across the solar system and (in the case of the Voyagers) beyond."

As well as its impressive operations center, which is very much an invite-only affair, NASA's DSN arm runs a website which lists the network's dish antennas and displays which spacecraft are speaking to which antennas — and even showing when there's a bare carrier versus actual modulated data going up to or down from the stars.

"What if," Gannon says, "the information driving the website could be used to power a physical display to show the status of my favorite spacecraft in real-time?:

The project which was thus born builds on Gannon's earlier efforts to build a Stranger Things-themed Halloween costume with 26 hand-wired LEDs. This time, Gannon opted for something easier: an addressable strip of Adafruit NeoPixels, connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer rather than a microcontroller.

"Rather than antenna-centric as the website, my build would pick several spacecraft and light up their silhouettes when active," Gannon writes. "After some quick prototyping, I landed on cutting the silhouette out of opaque material and using frosted vinyl (the kind you get to turn normal glass into a privacy window) to diffuse light from the individual LEDs."

Those LEDs are installed in a shadowbox frame, modified with foamboard and with the silhouettes of the tracked spacecraft in front of each set of three LEDs. A Python program running on the Raspberry Pi queries the DSN's website and loops through each antenna to find any which are communicating with the 10 target spacecraft.

"Execution of the loop only takes tens of milliseconds so a sleep every loop prevents me from hammering NASA's website," Gannon adds. "Contacts are tens of minutes, so this can be a fairly lengthy sleep and not miss much updating."

The full project write-up is available on Gannon's website, with source code and Eagle files for the custom board interfacing the Raspberry Pi with the LED strip available on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.