This is all very well, but Parkes is meant to be a research tool, not a communications ground station. Using it for Apollo was one thing. Using it for commercial lunar missions is quite another. If commercial missions need a dish that big, they should build it themselves.
On Fri, 26 Mar 2021 09:42:03 +1100, Sylvia Else scribed:
60 years according to this on ABC
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It is a matter of finding modern uses for it. The scientific demands that funded and built the Parkes Radio Telescope has mostly moved on and it, like other old scopes, isn't the latest and greatest so not in that much demand. Taking on the contract would have been an opportunity for extra funding to enable it to keep running for longer. This has to be more reliable than betting the Federal government will hand out enough research grants for blue-sky far in the future research that might find it useful to book time on the Parkes Telescope.
Keep in mind,the original computers, which also were the ones shown in "The Dish" movie*, are only of any vaue as scrap metal, if that. I wonder how the 'performance/usefulness' of the Parkes Scope compares.
Last I knew, the original computers from Parkes went to the Australian Computer Mmuseum
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which exists as concept being shuffled between sources of free/cheap storage, still had those original computers in their collection. At the time of the making of "The Dish", they were able to provide them for he film.
Can't track fast enough to follow anything orbiting much closer than the moon.
Can't locate a weak signal, it needs really accurate pointing data
Didn't have receivers for tracking anyhow (doppler, ranging).
Didn't have any command-uplink transmitter.
Only really useful to improve SNR on the TV link (it showed the "first steps"), or in an emergency if the directional antennae were to fail to steer and they had to revert back to using the onmi antennae (with voice, not video).
That article on The Guardian starts with a lie. Parkes did not "share Apollo 11's landing images" because it was below Parke's horizon until hours after the landing.
Larry Marshall is quoted lying also: "Dr Larry Marshall, CSIRO?s chief executive, said while it had been 50 years since Parkes telescope played a critical role in the original Nasa moon landing"
... when it played *no* role in the landing, and the role it did later play was *in no way* critical (TV images out of Honeysuckle were quite good, but not as low-noise as Parkes').
In short, The Dish is mostly a lie, a continuation of the lie that CSIRO has always told and continues to tell about the centrality of Parkes in the moon landing. Fun movie, but almost totally fictional.
Exactly, most of the heavy lifting was done at Honeysuckle Creek they did all the LEM telemetry, and commands. They also did a lot of the video along with Goldstone. Tidbinbilla did the telemetry and comms for the CSM orbiting during the landing. Carnarvon had done the initial orbit determination at the launch and maybe the TLI (not sure about that). Island Lagoon was tracking one of the Pioneers to give early warning of any solar flares while the astronauts were doing their moon walks.
It is not generally known that the whole landing nearly had to be delayed due to a fire in the Tidbinbilla transmitter, a bunch of us spent the night before in the South Australian desert stripping an old transmitter cabinet for parts that were flown straight to Canberra. The Transmitter was brought up just in time.
Parkes did nearly played a part in the Apollo 13 recovery, we stripped a bunch of comms gear out of Orrorral Valley and sent it to Parkes in case they were needed. As it turned out they weren't needed in the end.
A lot of people at the Australian NASA stations especially Honeysuckle Creek were rather pissed of at the movie and the myths that it engendered.
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Go to "TV from the Moon" and select "Parkes and Honeysuckle" for a full timeline. Note:
Over the years since 1969, there has been friendly debate between Parkes and Honeysuckle as to who had the TV at the first step.
While there was no competition between the stations ? and everyone expected the video to be taken from Goldstone (because the EVA was called early, and because the signal path from Goldstone to Houston was considerably shorter) ? it is now clear that the first few minutes of TV came through Goldstone, but that Houston switched to Honeysuckle Creek just before Neil Armstrong?s first step.
The picture from Parkes was used from about 9 minutes into the TV broadcast.
"Although designed and operated as a radio telescope for astronomical observations Parkes has also been used for tracking and receiving data from many space probes.
Played a leading role in the reception of the first video footage on the first Moon walk (Achievement) by the crew of Apollo 11 in 1969 featured in the fictional film "The Dish" (see also Parkes radio telescope and the Apollo 11 moon landing).
In 1979 NASA launched Apollo 13 its third mission to the moon. Two days into the flight (320?000 kilometres from Earth) an explosion on board destroyed the spacecraft's normal supply of electricity, light and water. The crew of James Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Haise were forced to abandon the command module and crawl into the lunar module. The problem was that the lunar module only had enough power for 45 hours operation while the return trip to Earth would take at least 90 hours. The Parkes telescope, under John Bolton's guidance, was central to securing communications between Houston and the Apollo 13 spacecraft and the successful return of the crew.
The Galileo probe to Jupiter, the Voyager exploration to Neptune and Uranus, the Giotto project to examine Halley's comet and the various Mars missions in early 2004.
In January 2005 it was a key element in a global linkup of 17 radio telescopes observing the descent of the Huygens probe through the atmosphere of Titan."
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Apparantly now even it's too small to pick up signals from the Voyager probes:
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The 70m Tidbinbilla dish they they're currently using for Voyager was itself built back in 1973:
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