In the 1960’s NASA realised they needed tracking stations (telescopes) on earth to be able to communicate with their space crafts in space from any position that they were at. To do that, they decided to build 3 tracking stations each covering a third of our viewable space. These three tracking stations are located in California, one line ran through Europe in Spain, then the other was placed down the Australian eastern states in Canberra. In 1964 Canberra was considered and chosen due to its size meaning that they could support the station with personnel and services, but Canberra wasn’t that wildly popular to that it would eventually expand rapidly. These tracking stations communicate with their spacecrafts by the use of radio waves, we send and receive radio signals from these big dishes (basically like giant mouths shouting out to space, then giant ears listening for those radio waves to be sent back). The strong need of communication for these spacecrafts is simply so we can tell them where to go, what to do, what hazards to be aware of and to collect more information about the universe. Canberra has played a major role in the scientific development of space, Honeysuckle is the name of the telescope located out the front of the ‘Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex’ which was mainly set up for the Apollo missions. The Honeysuckle telescope was the telescope which took pictures of Neil Armstrong on the moon during Apollo 11, which was the spaceflight that first landed humans on the moon. Almost everything any of us have ever seen, heard or learnt about space has been received on Earth from the Canberra tracking station and it’s sister stations.
- Isabella K.
