Picture Album of the
DEEP SPACE NETWORK

Echo Station at Goldstone, California

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This antenna was obtained under the auspices of NASA's Project Echo, which was a communications experiment between two antennas and a 30.5-meter (100-foot) balloon in orbit around Earth. The two antennas were the large horn at Holmdel, New Jersey, developed and operated by Bell Telephone Research Laboratories, and the antenna at Goldstone, developed and operated by JPL. Both facilities were equipped with transmitters and receivers. Some of the principal participants in this project were John Robinson Pierce, known as the father of communications satellites; William J. O'Sullivan, who conceived the idea of launching balloons for space studies; and Charles H. Townes Jr., who discovered the maser principle and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Townes supplied the first maser amplifiers for this experiment. The project had its origin during the 1957 International Geophysical Year.

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