As the submarine world remains pretty quiet at the moment, here is an Australian technical achievement:
Paul Shillito, an Englishman, of Curious Droid describes how Australia's Parkes radio telescope worked in record time to help reverse America's Apollo 13, near disaster in 1970.
While it is operated primarily for astronomy research, the Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, radio telescope has a long history of being contracted by NASA and other international space agencies to track and receive data from spacecraft:
· In 1962 it tracked the first interplanetary space mission, Mariner 2, as it flew by the planet Venus, and in 1969 it was a prime receiving station for the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon.
- In 1970 it was called in to help during the Apollo 13 emergency when an explosion crippled the spacecraft while it was en route to the Moon, and its Apollo support continued until the end of the manned lunar missions in December 1972.
- In the 1980s the Parkes telescope was used to receive signals from NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft and the European Space Agency's Giotto spacecraft, and in the 1990s it supported NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter.
- In the 2000s it tracked various spacecraft at Mars, and in 2005 Parkes was used in an experiment to directly receive signals from the European Space Agency's Huygens spaceprobe as it descended through the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
- Most recently, in 2012, Parkes played a support role in tracking NASA's Curiosity rover during its descent onto the Martian surface.
The fictional film 'The Dish' was based on the real role that the Parkes telescope played in receiving video footage of the first Moon walk by the crew of Apollo 11 in 1969.
The Parkes radio telescope.
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Pete