00:00We've been running for nearly 25 years with a 35 metre antenna, great big huge antenna
00:09which we use to communicate with spacecraft all around the solar system.
00:12And we've got a little tiny 4.5 metre antenna that we use for talking to rocket launchers from French Viana.
00:20It's lots of cool stuff. We've been talking to missions all around the solar system,
00:27Mars, Mercury, around the Sun, even crushing a spacecraft into an asteroid.
00:36Intentionally?
00:37Yes! It's the only time I've ever wanted a sudden loss of signal.
00:44Okay, so give us the details of this new piece of kit that's just been completed.
00:49A bit of an understatement there, describing it as a piece of kit.
00:52So it's a wonderful many hundred ton, 35 metre antenna that has a big suite of cryogenic feeds
01:01and cryogenic receivers and incredibly powerful amplifiers.
01:07So we're able to both talk to spacecraft, listen to into spacecraft all the way up to Jupiter.
01:13I mean, a good example is that we can hear a mobile phone on Mars, and we can actually talk back.
01:19So we can talk back to these wonderful spacecraft, for example, JUICE,
01:23which is going out to explore the icy moons of Jupiter and have a look under the ice.
01:28Hopefully science is fine.
01:29Yeah, and so how does that expand the capabilities of what you're doing there compared to what you could do before?
01:36It's way cool. At the moment, as you can imagine, ESA has missions that run all around the solar system.
01:43So we're around Mars, around Mercury.
01:46We've got a new guy going out to Jupiter.
01:49And we can only point in one direction with a current 35 metre antenna.
01:53But now that we've got two, we've basically doubled the amount of data that we can pull down from all of these wonderful missions
01:59and double the amount of time that we can provide on the sky.
02:03And you're doing this in conjunction with European Space Agency, as I understand it.
02:07We tend to hear a lot about NASA and SpaceX.
02:09But how much of a force is the European Space Agency in space exploration?
02:14European Space Agency is huge.
02:16They have a permanent commitment to the International Space Station, launching an enormous number of deep space, deep space assets.
02:31Juice as I mentioned, DART, BepiColombo in the inner solar system, Mars Explorer and ExoMars at Mars.
02:41Euclid, which is one of the new, incredibly huge space observatories at the Lagrange Point.
02:48So there are so many wonderful, wonderful ESA missions.
02:52And you're in seventh heaven there?
02:54Oh, absolutely. I get paid to do this job.
02:57Good stuff.
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