The moment we established 2-way communication in cis-lunar space

Screencapture from Iris Terminal showing downlinked message “Hello, Earth!”. Timestamps and other confidential info removed for sharing.

Communication is sent from Iris Mission Control → Astrobotic Mission Control → Deep Space Network (DSN) Radio Telescope→ Peregrine → Iris and vice versa.

Had we landed on the moon, we would have used 2.4GHz WiFi to communicate with the lander, which would then downlink info to Earth via DSN.

One of the interesting challenges with communication that I learnt during live ops was that it is actually kind of difficult for DSN to grab a good lock onto Peregrine (or perhaps any spacecraft). There are only 3 dish antennas in the DSN network on Earth, and we experienced a number of scheduled backout periods when there was no direct line of sign between the spacecraft (with us) and a DSN dish.