On the day of the Apollo moon landing, 21 July 1969, wind gusts of up to 110km/h buffeted the Parkes radio telescope as it sat in a sheep paddock in regional New South Wales.
It is meant to shut down when the winds hit 35km/h, but the operators risked it all to help broadcast Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.
The 64-metre Parkes telescope was immortalised in one of Australia’s favourite films, The Dish, with Sam Neill playing the chief scientist.
And now it’s set for a new role tracking the Artemis II mission which launched from Florida on Thursday. Four astronauts onboard the spacecraft Orion will orbit the Earth before heading to the moon, then slingshot back to Earth to splash down in the Pacific.
It’s the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17, more than 50 years ago, when Captain Eugene A Cernan spent 73 hours on the moon’s surface.
The Dish, which was given its Wiradjuri name Murriyang in 2020, has volunteered to track Orion and send data to Nasa. It is hoping to demonstrate its capabilities for what Nasa’s Kevin Coggins describes as “building a resilient, public-private ecosystem that will support the Golden Age of Innovation and exploration”.
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The heavy lifting on Australia’s side of the Artemis II mission will be done by the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC), part of Nasa’s Deep Space Network (DSN), which is run by the national science agency the CSIRO.
The CDSCC, then known as the Tidbinbilla deep space tracking station, was somewhat sidelined in The Dish, as was the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station, which actually captured the initial images of Armstrong before Parkes took over.
But the CDSCC will play a central role with Artemis II, working with other parts of the DSN in Madrid and California.
“We will be tracking from our station here whenever the moon or the mission is visible in our sky,” the CDSCC education officer, Rhianna Lyons, says. “It won’t be visible to the naked eye, but it is to our radio antennae.
“And during the working hours for our site, our operators will be the ones operating the entire network, regardless of who’s tracking. We’ll be the primary communications [point] so the astronauts can contact home, so we can contact them.”
Meanwhile, the Australian National University has teamed up with Nasa via the Australian Space Agency and will track, send and receive communication from Orion via its Quantum Optical Ground Station at Mount Stromlo Observatory. It is testing laser communications, which could then be used on future lunar missions.
Space communication usually uses radio waves, but laser communications can transmit data up to 100 times faster.
“Building this capability in the southern hemisphere is critical to establishing reliable communication to the moon and the solar system,” Dr Kate Ferguson, from the ANU Institute for Space, says.
Southern Launch, which has rocket testing and launching facilities in South Australia, will also help with tracking, using a Raven Defense dish.
There are also two Australian-built components of the Orion capsule.
Lyons says the CDSCC crew have been preparing for Artemis II for a couple of years, and helping to prepare trackers in Spain and America.
And while images of mission control are off limits for now, she says it is probably not what you imagine from footage from Nasa or Hollywood.
“They’re in a circle with their backs to each other,” she says.
“It’s so they can turn inwards, talk, bounce off each other, without the computer screen in the way.”
The astronauts on the Orion will fly further away from Earth than anyone has before, around the dark side of the moon, and will see parts of it that have not yet been seen.
The mission will test life support systems, navigational ability and radiation protection ahead of a planned 2028 moon landing, which itself is aimed at developing a lunar launchpad to prepare to send humans to Mars.
The Swinburne University of Technology astronomer Alan Duff, says Artemis II is a historic mission.
“Artemis II will break records, sending humans beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo missions, indeed reaching further from Earth than anyone in history,” he says.
The Apollo missions were about winning the space race and beating the Russians during the cold war. This time the race is against China, as part of Donald Trump’s “America first” approach. It is also about science and exploration and the hunt for extraterrestrial resources.
“It is more about a colonisation of space,” says Prof Andrew Dempster, the director of UNSW’s Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research.
He says the Artemis missions were initially “simply a stepping stone to Mars, the real target”, but Nasa’s announcement last week that it would pause plans for an orbiting station in favour of a lunar base is seen to “refocus the strategic aims once again to the moon”.
The Macquarie University astrophysics professor Richard de Grijs, who is also the International Space Science Institute-Beijing’s executive director, says a lunar base is now a “realistic prospect”.
And he says Artemis II is “not just a mission” but “a signal of how humanity will organise itself beyond Earth”. China is also preparing to land humans on the moon, while private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX are also heavily involved in space exploration.
“What we are seeing is the early architecture of a shared human presence in deep space,” de Grijs says.
