Artemis: the Fucino Space Centre is ready to contribute to the return to the Moon

Telespazio’s Fucino Space Centre and the Italian Space Agency (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana or ASI) will support tracking of NASA’s Artemis I mission taking the Orion capsule around the Moon.

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.