What is the process that they actually use to determine who gets what time on the DSN? Is that pretty involved and political?
The process actually starts before a spacecraft is launched. We have several groups that are involved, depending on where you are relative to the actual tracking time. So in 2001 we would be working on the ’03-’04 contention periods, trying to trade those upcoming with our preliminary schedules. In some cases it continues right down to an hour or half an hour before a track, we can make changes. And in fact, we put out a schedule called a seven-day schedule, and that frequently has hundreds of changes made to it during the course of the seven-day period.
