Located in the desert near Barstow, California, it comprises a 500-kW X-band (8500 MHz) transmitter and a low-noise receiver on the 70-m DSS 14 antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex.

[1] It has been used to investigate Mercury, Venus, Mars, the asteroids, and moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

In the monostatic radar mode, GSSR both transmits and receives.

In bistatic mode, GSSR transmits and other radio astronomy facilities receive.

Although more difficult to schedule, this offers two advantages - the transmitter does not need to turn off to allow the receiver to listen, and it allows the use of interferometry to extract more information from the reflected signal.