New antenna to expand communication with spacecraft

ABC NEWS (Australia)

A new deep space antenna has been built in Western Australia with the potential to communicate with spacecraft as far away as Jupiter. The European Space Agency's new antenna is the latest to be constructed at the New Norcia station 130 kilometres north of Perth and will be operated in partnership with the CSIRO.

Transcript

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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