The past, present, and future of ground station automation within the DSN

This paper describes an architecture for an autonomous Deep Space Tracking Station (DS-T). The architecture targets fully automated routine operations encompassing scheduling and resource allocation, antenna and receiver predict generation, track procedure generation from service requests, and closed loop control and error recovery for the station subsystems. This architecture has been validated by the construction of a prototype DS-T station, which has performed a series of demonstrations of autonomous ground station control for downlink services with NASA's Mars Global Surveyor.