It was John Sarkissian's surname that launched a lifelong mission to explore the mysteries of space.
Mr Sarkissian was in Year 5 when a teacher gave his class an assignment to use the Dewey Decimal system for research on any topic.
"She was going through the class alphabetically and because my name is Sarkissian, I had a bit of time to think about it," he remembers.
"So I'm racking my brains. I think, 'I'll do racing cars' but someone before me chooses racing cars.
"I think 'I'll do planes' but someone else wants to do planes, so I decide I'll do the moon, the stars and the planets."
During the assignment, he and a friend competitively quizzed each other on the diameter and escape velocity of different planets.
The next year he got his first telescope to gaze at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. He was hooked.
His father, a poetry teacher, was concerned about his obsession and tried to convince him to have a backup plan in commerce or accounting.
"I said 'Dad, if I don't do astronomy, I don't care what I do, I'll sweep the streets if I have to but I only want to do astronomy'."
Decades later, Mr Sarkissian is an operations scientist at the CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope in central western NSW, affectionately known as 'The Dish' or by its Wiradjuri name, Murriyang.
On Monday it will be 61 years since the 64-metre wide telescope began operations, becoming a giant in global astronomy research and international space missions.
The dish has found 2500 new galaxies in the region's skies, mapped hydrogen gas in fine detail and discovered almost half of all known pulsars or rapidly spinning neutron stars.
It played a central role in receiving images of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon and more recently tracked data from spacecraft Voyager 2 as it moved into interstellar space.
Mr Sarkissian started work in Parkes in 1996 after a brief stint at Armenia's Byurakan Observatory, just as the Soviet Union fell.
"As all that happened, there were power, fuel and food shortages, everything was just terrible.
"I had to do everything by hand, look at their radio sources and correlate them. It took forever."
He signed an 11-month contract with the CSIRO to track NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter for more than eight years, the first to traverse an outer planet.
He has stayed on for 26 years.
The telescope captured imaginations after the 2000 movie The Dish, a comedy about Australia's role in the moon landing.
Mr Sarkissian was a technical adviser for the film, once spending two weeks poring over books to write a complex algorithm on a blackboard for a single scene.
The hard work paid off, as thousands of visitors continue to visit the dish each year to learn about science and astronomy.
Now staff are working on upgrades to the telescope, which will continue to search the skies in coming decades, Mr Sarkissian said.
"It may be in the middle of a sheep paddock but in many ways it's the epicentre of world radio astronomy."
