Canberra Space Center

  Canberra, Australia
Sunday, December 16, 2007

On my way out I decided to go by the Canberra Space Centre, and even though it is a small museum, I stayed for about 4 hours, it was so interesting. 

The 72 m Dish

There are really a lot of cool missions going on as we speak right now, including the Spirit and Oppurtunity rovers on the surface of Mars, the Cassini mission to Saturn, return samples from comets, and many more.  It is a tragedy that people don't realize this and only hear about these things once in a while, usually when something goes wrong.  The rovers on Mars were originally planned to last for 90 days- and in January of next year they will have been operational for 4 YEARS.  How extraordinary is that?  They put the raw images from the rovers on the internet as they get to the center, viewable by anyone.  There are 3 Deep Space Network stations, in Goldstone, CA (a couple of hours from Ridgecrest), Canberra, and Madrid, Spain, roughly 120 degrees longitude apart so they can look at all parts of outer space at any time.  Maybe I will get a chance to visit the Madrid one and I will definitely see the California one when I get back. 

Mars rover model

These stations recieve the signals from NASA's spacecraft currently exploring- including Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, both of which have crossed beyond the influence of the sun, well outside Pluto's orbit, 12.4 BILLION kilometers away from the sun.  Unimaginable.  While I was there the big dish was recieving data from the Voyager spacecraft (2 I think). 

The station includes the actual dish that received and broadcast to the world the television image of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, and is still operational.  They had some actual hardware that had been on shuttle missions, and great videos detailing current missions that are sending back extraordinary images. 

Saturn Eclipse

The one of Saturn (from the Cassini probe website) is an eclipse of the sun by Saturn and is astounding.  No human has ever before seen this image before this probe... and even so you and I are probably one of the first few million people to see the image at all.  I was lucky enough to catch some of a special presentation put on by one of the employees, who showed us this image as well as some awesome ones from the Mars rovers.  He did a great job and concluded with this: according to the experts we will be exploring Mars with people by around 2037... and using the age of the first Moon explorers as a comparison, it means that the first person to walk on Mars is between kindergarten and senior year of high school right now.  Makes you think.