Space Exploration Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for spacecraft operators, scientists, engineers, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In the Wikipedia page for the Goldstone DSN complex there are coordinates. If you click them it takes you to GeoHack. I copies the decimal coordinates there 35.426667, -116.89 into my browser and it took me to the Goldstone complex.
Why does the map show a landmark labeled "Mars" next to one of the large dishes?
Is this an easter egg, or some name for the location?
The answer is in the Wikipedia article:
The DSS 14, "Mars" telescope
So it's the name for one of the antennas of the Goldstone complex.
Here are the antennas and their names:
I've just run across this explanation of why this antenna in particular is named "Mars". From https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/about/complexes/70-meter/
NASA built the 70-meter antenna when ambitious missions began venturing beyond Earth orbit and needed more powerful communications tools to track them. The 70-meter antenna in Goldstone, dubbed the "Mars antenna," was the first of the giant antennas designed to receive weak signals and transmit very strong ones far out into space, featuring a 64-meter-wide (210-foot) dish when it became operational in 1966. The dish was upgraded from 64 meters to 70 meters in 1988 to enable the antenna to track NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft as it encountered Neptune.
While officially dubbed Deep Space Station 14, or DSS 14, the antenna picked up the Mars name from its first task: tracking the Mariner 4 spacecraft, which had been lost by smaller antennas after its historic flyby of Mars in 1965.
