Posted by tourdemars to Interplanetary Internet at January 21, 2003 12:00 PM

The firestorms that devastated the Canberra region at the weekend, killing four people, also forced NASA's Deep Space Network facility offline for four hours, it has emerged. The DSN installation, 40 km from the Australian capital, is responsible for tracking and controlling deep space spacecraft from the southern hemisphere. There are two other tracking stations in the northern hemisphere.