Malargüe Deep Space Antenna

Malargüe Deep Space Antenna is ESA’s Deep Space Antenna 3 (DSA 3), an operational 35 m tracking station about 30 km south of Malargüe city in Mendoza, Argentina. ESA documents X-band transmission and reception plus Ka-band reception, daily routine support for deep-space and scientific missions including Gaia, Mars Express, ExoMars, BepiColombo, Herschel, Planck and LISA Pathfinder, and resource-sharing support for other agencies. Its main functions are telemetry reception, telecommand and radiometric measurements including ranging, Doppler and Delta-DOR; the site also supports radio-science analysis, has a no-break power plant, and is remotely controlled from ESOC in Darmstadt with local maintenance and operation by a five-engineer team. ESA publishes an operational site address but no routine visitor hours; arrange current permission before field planning. The published antenna coordinates are retained as the operational reference.