Five great Australian moments in space

Dr Miriam Baltuck, managing the operations of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex.

In the week of the 40th Anniversary of the lunar landing CIO brings you five great Australian achievements in space, courtesy of Dr Miriam Baltuck, director of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC).

1. 50 years of space tracking and co-operation (1960-2010)

With the first the first co-operation treaty between Australia and the US signed in 1960 we are very quickly moving towards our grand 50th anniversary celebration in February 2010.

Since the 1960’s the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC) has enabled solar system exploration from the earliest Pioneer and Voyager missions in the 1970s, all NASA’s Mars missions, Galileo’s trip to Jupiter and Cassini’s to Saturn, through to the New Horizons missions which is on its way to Pluto for a 2015 encounter. Australia’s role has been critical to all the solar systems exploration missions.

We are the only southern hemisphere site and with the outer planet configuration moving to the southern hemisphere we are this coming decade all the more important. That’s why we have the lead for the New Encounters mission when it gets to Pluto.

Anything that goes 30,000kms from the earth is something that depends on our support. There are currently 40 plus missions we have a role in supporting.

2. Moon Landing (1969)

Australia’s role in the Moon landing is well-known, but we really did get a special treat when the astronauts on their landing said “Heck no, we’re not taking a nap, we’re getting out.” That put us in the spotlight to get the first steps of Neil Armstrong on the Moon.

The film, The Dish, is the story of the Parkes telescope, but it was the tracking station at Honey Suckle Creek which actually captured the first 11 minutes of Neil Armstrong on the Moon. But the movie did serve to highlight Australia’s critical role in the success of the Apollo mission.

3. The Galileo mission to Jupiter (1989)

During the Galileo mission the high gain antenna on the spacecraft failed to deploy properly, and because of the configuration of the planets at the time, the bulk of the tracking fell on CDSCC here in the southern hemisphere.

CDSCC did an arrangement with the Parkes antenna which meant we could provide a downlink. Even though the data couldn’t be streamed at the high rate you’d get with a high gain antenna, we were able to capture the data in sufficient quantities.

It was a hugely successful mission and without the that linkage between CDSCC and Parkes, Galileo would have achieved only a fraction of what it did accomplish.

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Australia is a the forefront of developing applications for using satellite-based earth observation data -- in particular the work being done in Hobart around monitoring sea levels using ocean altimeters.

Australia has developed a carbon characterisation algorithm -- a way of characterising carbon content -- which has become very important with the carbon accounting systems and schemes which are under development at the moment.

Organisations such as the Global Earth observation system of systems (GEOSS) have praised this carbon accounting scheme that has been developed. It can be used to create a “time series” so that we can see how land cover and land use and the carbon content has change over time.

In terms of how we understand our changes in our environment, and how we need to respond to those changes, Australia is at the cutting edge of developing the formula for use of data that can be used internationally.

5. CRCSS/FEDSAT (2002)

FedSat is a mission under the Co-operative Research Centre for Satellite Systems which was set up to research and develop low-cost satellite missions.

The FedSat mission saw Australia develop a home-grown satellite which had some communications and observation capabilities, and a GPS receiver contributed by NASA.

It was launched by the Japanese Space Agency, but was a real proof of concept for Australian capability to: develop hardware; space qualify it; develop the spacecraft; do the mission operations; data retrieval; use of the data for atmospheric studies; and the communications technologies demonstrations.

It was our opportunity to demonstrate that we can develop a concept, can develop instrumentation, and a spacecraft and can utilize the data in the science applications for which it was intended.