Goldstone Solar System Radar
Goldstone Deep Space Network
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| Organization | NASA / JPL / Caltech |
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| Location | Mojave Desert (near Barstow), San Bernardino County, California, U.S. |
| Coordinates | 35°25′36″N 116°53′24″W / 35.42667°N 116.89000°WCoordinates: 35°25′36″N 116°53′24″W / 35.42667°N 116.89000°W |
| Altitude | 2950 ft |
| Established | 1985 |
| Website | Asteroid Radar Research |
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The Goldstone Solar System Radar, or GSSR, is a large radar system used for investigating objects in the Solar system. Located in the desert near Barstow, California, it comprises a 500-kW X-band (8500 MHz) transmitter and a low-noise receiver on the 70-m DSS 14 antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. It has been used to investigate Mercury, Venus, Mars, the asteroids, and moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The most comparable facility is the radar at Arecibo Observatory.
GSSR can work in two different modes. In the monostatic radar mode, GSSR both transmits and receives. In bistatic mode, GSSR transmits and other radio astronomy facilities receive. Although more difficult to schedule, this offers two advantages - the transmitter does not need to turn off to allow the receiver to listen, and it allows the use of interferometry to extract more information from the reflected signal.
Bodies that have been investigated using GSSR include:
4179 Toutatis in 1996
(53319) 1999 JM8 in 1999
(308635) 2005 YU55 in 2011
2014 HQ124 in 2014
Comet 252P/LINEAR
2015 TB145 in 2015
...
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