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Deep Space Operations Center

Also known as the Dark Room, this is the heart of the Space Flight Operations Facility at JPL. The Center is the hub linking over 800 independent workstations all over the world. These state-of-the-art engineering workstations run the UNIX operating system and some commercial off-the-shelf software.

Most of the software has been uniquely developed or adapted at JPL to perform the specialized telemetry (science information and spacecraft-status data) processing and spacecraft commanding tasks required for operating multiple missions. JPL is the destination point for all the data beamed back to Earth via NASA's worldwide Deep Space Network from planetary and Earth-orbiting spacecraft as well as spacecraft of other space agencies around the world.