Bart Bear's Blog

One of my favourite trips is out to the NASA Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla. This is about 50 km away from where we live. It is tucked away in a valley with hills between it and the Canberra suburbs so it is almost completely free of radio interference. That is very important because the radio telescopes (called dishes) here have to pick up very faint signals from all the spacecraft way out in the distant parts of the Solar System. The biggest dish is 70m diameter, the biggest in the southern hemisphere. It is used to talk to spacecraft that are in orbit around other planets, or on their way to them. It can even hear the signals from the Voyager spacecraft which are now so far away in the very outer fringes of the Solar System that the signal from them is hundreds of thousands of times less powerful than a watch battery. The smaller dishes are used to communicate with spacecraft in orbits close to Earth. Tidbinbilla has been tracking spacecraft, sending commands to them and receiving data from them since the late 1960s. Back in the days of the first Moon landings there were two other tracking stations in valleys near here at Honeysuckle Creek and Orroral Valley, but now all NASA tracking is done from Tidbinbilla. It is a lovely drive out to Tid, the visitors centre is full of interesting stuff telling the story of space exploration, and the Oldies say the Moonrock Cafe is pretty good too. Do visit DSCC43 when you are in Canberra.

Labels: Canberra