About DSES

DEEP SPACE EXPLORATION SOCIETY

4164 Austin Bluffs Parkway #562
Colorado Springs, CO 80918

DSES is a not for profit organization whose primary purposes are research and education. We exist to foster the exploration and understanding of space by encouraging students, society members, and the general public to participate in that exploration. We facilitate experiments designed to expand our knowledge of space, and to execute ground based missions designed to support those experiments.

The unique contributions we provide to other exploratory space missions are: (1) a low cost alternative satellite downlink ground station, and (2) an observational tool for the radio astronomy community.

We are dedicated to exploring and learning about space through radio observations. We build our equipment. We pursue a scientific approach to learning about our universe that is too far away to visit.

It also conduct outreach programs to local area schools, community colleges, and universities. We foster a variety of opportunities to work with education and science centers. Plans include a system for making real time data from our facilities available on the internet, as well as providing remote command and control of the antenna.

Click on these links for a historical look at our Plishner facility, brochures from which much of this writeup was taken: DSES Poster 1 and DSES Poster 2.

This is our information brochure , (written March 2019).

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Our major project is restoring and operating a 60-foot dish antenna for radio astronomy and amateur radio experimenting.  Since 2009 our volunteer members have been working hard to restore and modernize the antenna and its support facilities. In August 2016 we succeeded in making scientific measurements of galactic neutral hydrogen at 1.4 GHz.

Our 60-foot dish antenna site is located in Haswell, Colorado, about 90 miles southeast of Colorado Springs.  The site is named the Paul Plishner Radio Astronomy and Space Sciences Center in honor of our donor who was an early researcher in Radar. The  dish antenna is one of several that were built by the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) for tropospheric propagation work, in support of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) radar from 1957 to 1974.  Those antenna sites were located from Colorado to Arkansas.