Tidbinbilla

Apr 15: Tidbinbilla

Macarthur Astronomical Society Tour, 7th April 2013.

Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communications Compex is one of the the three principle locations for tracking Beyond Earth Space Missions, such as spacecraft orbiting Mercury, the Moon and Saturn, not to mention the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Voyager spacecraft now in the outermost regions of the Solar System.

The main dish, NASA receiver DSS-43, 70m diameter. This wide-angle image does not do justice to the awesome size of this huge dish and its supporting structure. If it was maneouvred to point horizontally in the direction of where I was standing with the camera it would be only be a couple of metres away!

Detail of the receiving tower.

NASA receiver DSS-46, 26m dia dish. We saw this near the car park when we arrived and thought it looked impressively huge - until we went inside and saw the 70m dish!