Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Dish(es): Australia and the Deep Space Network

Episode Date: December 14, 2009

Australia's key role in the Deep Space Network is explored with Glen Nagle of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Down Under and Deep in Space, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. When Apollo 11 gets to the moon, Parkes will now be the prime receiving station. Meaning? We've got the moonwalk. The people in this place, they know what they're doing?

I believe so. I don't even hope so. Why'd they pick us? Turns out it's the largest radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. What's it doing in the middle of a sheep paddock? That clip was from The Dish, a somewhat fictionalized story of Australia's role in providing the live television pictures of the first steps on the moon back in 1969.

We'll talk with Glenn Nagel of the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex, part of the amazing Deep Space Network that still keeps us in touch with spacecraft throughout the solar system. Bill Nye wonders if someday we'll watch rocket launches in a town called Sheboygan. And there's my weekly What's Up visit with Bruce Betts. Let's get started with the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator, Emily Lakdawalla. So, Emily, you got some time on somebody else's radio show last week. I did. There was a pretty exciting thing in the sky over Norway last week, this bizarre spiraling thing that appeared.

Everybody in Norway seemed to have been able to see it in their sky. And then right at the end of this spiral thing spinning in the sky, all of a sudden it looked like the center of it opened up to reveal the gate to a new dimension. It was pretty shocking. And I watched the videos, of course, linked from your blog. Turns out there was still a pretty interesting explanation for this, but I guess it was our friend Doug Ellison who may have gotten the first word out.

Well, I don't know if he got the first word out, but he got the best illustration out that really convinced people that it was what the scuttlebutt said it was, which was a failed Russian missile launch. The Russians had actually warned Norwegians that they would be doing missile tests, submarine-launched missile tests in the White Sea that day and to stay away. So there was already a lot of rumors that this may have been related to that failed launch, but Doug produced this animation that showed how if you had a rocket that was launched normally, and then there was a problem and some exhaust started venting out the side, that could spin up the rocket, make it start rotating and venting out the side, which generates that huge spiral expanding out in the sky.

The Norwegians just happened to have a good view looking right down the tailpipe of the rocket, as it were, which made the spiral look so symmetrical and just spreading out from a single point. Once the rocket ran out of fuel, then the center opened up. There was no more stuff coming out of the vent, and it just opened up to black sky in the middle. And then I guess the next day, the Russians did come clean and said, yep, it was us. They did, and it is kind of embarrassing for them. It's their 13th test of this particular Bulava submarine-launched missile, and I think the seventh failure. Oh, my. Not a good record. We'll also give some credit to UnmannedSpaceFlight.com, where Doug posted his animation, which just happens to be one of your favorite haunts.

And our guest today, Glenn Nagel, can be found there pretty frequently as well. That's true. It's getting to be quite the happening place for unmanned spaceflight aficionados. Now, we got one other thing to mention, which I was so impressed by visually that I mentioned it in my own Twitter account. But you've got a great animation of something that happened in the skies over Mars that was captured by, was it Mars Express? It was Mars Express with their high resolution stereo camera, which was built in Germany. It's just a gorgeous animation showing Phobos passing just in front of Deimos. Phobos is the larger and closer of Mars's two moons. Deimos

is the more distant. Now, if you're standing on Mars's equator, you can see the two pass overhead very close to each other in the sky all the time. But Mars Express, being a polar orbiter, had to be in exactly the right place at the right time to witness this. And it's really a credit to their navigators that they managed to catch this. And it's beautiful. And we'll put up the links to both of these stories in the Planetary Society blog, maintained, of course, by Emily, the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society. Emily, thanks again. You're welcome, Matt. Thanks for having me. I'll be right back with Glenn Nagel. Here's Bill.

Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of Planetary Society. And this week, there's a lot going on in commercial space development. There's so much going on that people want to build a spaceport in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, or Sheboygan, Wisconsin. They're going to fly rockets out of Wisconsin. Now, let me tell you, since the days of Jules Verne, since I first got interested in rocket flight, people have wanted to launch rockets from near the Earth's equator. You get a little push. If you're going to go west to east around the Earth, you get the Earth's spin to help you out.

So even Jules Verne had his rockets leaving for the moon. They left from Florida. But hold it. What if you're going to go polar? What if you're going to go polar? What if you're going to go over the North and South Poles? Then you don't really need to be near the equator. And the arguments are that there's so much industrial infrastructure now near the college towns in Wisconsin that people want to fly out of Sheboygan. They want to launch rockets in

Sheboygan. Let me just say, that's cool. If we had rocket pads, rocket ports, space ports all over the world, we'd have that much more space exploration. And along that line, SpaceX, Elon Musk's company, is going to test the Dragon space capsule. Ultimately, we hope to put people in it, fly up and down to, let's say, the International Space Station, but the tests right now are starting with the cargo version. Everybody going in circles worried about the space shuttle not being available. Maybe indeed the commercial spacecraft will be available. Wait, wait, there's more. Richard Branson and Bert Rutan have got White Knight 2 and Spaceship 2 almost ready to fly. This would be where they take you up to 50,000 feet, drop you your little

rocket ship off the carrier plane, and you go way, way up where the sky is black into outer space, and you free fall for several minutes. You're weightless for several minutes for the very reasonable price of $215,000. But there's enough people who want to do it where they're going to start pulling this off. So indeed, maybe at last, the commercial sector is picking up the slack, NASA can focus on new exciting missions to new exciting destinations, and the world of space exploration will change for the better for all of us. It's getting so wild, we're going to fly out of Sheboygan. I got to fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. Glenn Nagel is the Education and Outreach Manager for the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex,

a network of giant radio telescopes and transceivers in Australia, whose major client for more than 40 years has been NASA's Deep Space Network. We'll link to the website Glenn is responsible for at the CDSCC, along with Skywatch, the TV series he hosted for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Glenn, it is great to be speaking to you halfway around the world and down there in the southern hemisphere. Thank you for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thanks very much, Matt. Yeah, it's a lovely day here on the other side of the planet. You do stay busy down there, don't you? I know you've got a tour, some schoolchildren coming by soon.

Yeah, we actually get about 15,000 students through every year on field trips coming out to see us at the Deep Space Tracking Station. And we're quite fortunate because unlike the other stations in the network in Madrid, Spain, and in Goldstone in California, they're in more isolated sites. So they see a handful of groups through all the time, but we certainly see the lion's share of those eager students trying to find out a little bit more about the universe. Well, you've mentioned the other two sites, of course, major sites in the Deep Space Network,

but this is the first that we have spoken to you folks down under. It's quite exciting for me because I just finished watching the movie The Dish, which I highly recommend to the audience of Planetary Radio. Yeah, it's a great movie, of course, talking about the tale of the role that Australia played in the Apollo 11 moon landing. And the movie is great. It's a movie we kind of love to hate

because while it tells a fabulous story, it doesn't quite tell the whole story of what happened back in July 1969. What did it get right, and what did it not tell as part of that story? What it did, it talked about the role of the Parkes Radio Telescope, which is in central New South Wales, about 400 miles from Sydney. And it talks about that antenna, its big 64-meter-wide, 210-foot dish, being able to return those

first images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon. But, of course, that's not quite the case. There was a number of stations in Australia at the time, during the 60s and the 70s, some in Western Australia and South Australia and Queensland and here in Canberra in the ACT. And through all those sites, they had variously supported different space missions

right through the Apollo, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo era. But it came down to three stations, specifically supporting Apollo 11. It was the tracking station where I work here at the Space Tracking Station at Tidbinbilla, which is just outside of Canberra. There's the Honeysuckle Creek Station, which is a little bit further south from us, about maybe 40 minutes drive, and the Parks Radio Telescope in New South Wales. But, of course, the makers of the movie, rather than confusing the audience, showing multiple antennas, different people working at different sites, decided to concentrate the entire story at Parks.

So what actually happened on that historic day is quite a tale in itself. When the first pictures were supposed to come back from the moon, part of the original plan was to get those pictures back through the station in California. But an incorrect switch setting at the Californian station meant that the picture that Houston received was actually upside down. Now, of course, not wanting to show men walking the moon to the world upside down, and too late to get everybody

in a stand on their heads to watch it on television, they, of course, looked to Parks. Now now parks was supposed to help bring back those pictures it was the largest dish in australia at the time before they built our big 70 meter dish here in canberra but at the critical moment as armstrong was coming down the ladder they didn't have a tv picture at parks and not because of any problems there it was simply because the astronauts were so excited about being those first people to land on the moon that they didn't stick to their schedule and of course got out of their spacecraft about four hours earlier than was originally planned for. What they meant for Parkes was for them the moon hadn't risen yet high enough above their local horizon. They sort of portray that in the movie.

So they couldn't get a picture. Goldstone provided this upside down picture which they then corrected get a picture. Goldstone's provided this upside-down picture, which they then corrected, but the picture was quite high contrast. NASA's still looking for the very best picture they could get, and our job at Tivinbilla here was to support Michael Collins in orbit. Didn't have the opportunity to switch over and make Neil just hang on the ladder waiting for us to go and get a TV picture. It would have broken mission rules anyway, losing contact with Mike. So they looked to the Honeysuckle Creek Station. Now, at that site, they had this tiny 26-metre-wide dish, 85 feet,

the smallest of all the antennas in the network that was playing a role in the first moon landing. And their job on that day was to get voice communication back from the astronauts on the moon and to get data back from their experiments. But fortunately, also on that afternoon, which for us here in Australia was 12.56pm, July 21st, 1969, July 20th in the US,

they were carrying a TV signal also. They had a picture, a great picture. It was the right way up. And that's what the world got to see. So in fact, actually the first 10 minutes of the moon broadcast was through the Honeysuckle Creek Station here in Canberra. Parks came in later. So the movie doesn't quite tell you all of that story. Artistic license, I guess we have to chalk it up to that. How lucky for all

of us that that much smaller dish was still able to deliver that live signal, which I was a kid and glued to the television like millions around the world. Yeah, I was seven years old and having no idea at the time that these hazy sort of black and white images were coming back from a place just so close to home. Something fun that I found out about just in recent times is, of course, when the pictures came back here in Canberra, they were broadcast live around Australia and then relayed via satellite over to the United States to broadcast for the rest of the world. So, in fact, here in Australia, we got to see the moonwalk 300 milliseconds before the rest of the world. Wonderful.

Wonderful. You've certainly stayed very busy since that time, working around the clock at all of these various dishes, part of the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex that you serve. Most of what happens there is radio astronomy, or is it more of this work of monitoring missions as part of the DSN? Yeah, literally 99.9% of the work we do is the two-way radio communication to all the dozens of spacecraft spread out across the solar system. So we've supported virtually every mission that has ever gone out there, and not just missions for NASA, and that's certainly the way we started out doing manned and unmanned spacecraft, Not just missions for NASA, and that's certainly the way we started out, doing manned and unmanned spacecraft,

but over the last 45 years that we've been here at our site, we've supported hundreds of missions and now representing many, many nations around the world. So I think we currently support over 40 individual craft representing 22 different nations around this planet. We'll hear more from Glenn Nagel of Australia's CDSCC and the Deep Space Network. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects.

I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action,

helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, Transcription by CastingWords received the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. My guest is Glenn Nagel, long-time education and outreach manager for the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex in Australia,

which has been part of the Deep Space Network since before the Apollo moon missions. The giant bowl-like antennas like the one at Parks in New South Wales don't appear to have changed much in all that time. A dish is a dish. So as long as you've got a good parabolic surface, you can do all the other upgrades around it, making more sensitive receivers and improving electronics and hydraulic systems and all the other systems

that make the antenna work. And we've got a fantastic team of people here, as do work at the other sites around the world, making sure that these antennas can be operationally perfect 24-7 to do this kind of work. Is there a degree of competition, or is it more a comradeship between your facility and the others that you mentioned in Spain and here in California? Well, we really have a couple of sayings within the Deep Space Network. One, don't leave Earth without us. That's very important. Nobody goes anywhere, does anything, arrives anywhere, lands anywhere,

or goes into orbit or gets to the other there and back without the Deep Space Network. And, of course, we also have this saying, which is one team, one mission. So our job as this one team, all three stations around the world, but working together to provide this 24-hour coverage and to get all the available data back. Now, we're required by NASA to get about 95% of the data returned. But it is rare that the stations ever drop below sort of 99.5. I think our statistics just for the month past is 99.94%. And you only lose that tiny amount at 0.06% through to usually problems with the spacecraft or extraordinary weather events.

What are you looking toward in the future? I mean, as NASA begins the process of retiring the space shuttle, I assume that the DSN will continue to play a very important role as other spaceships begin to take flight and eventually return to the moon and hopefully beyond? Well, of course, yeah. The Deep Space Network is a part of SCAN, which is the Space Communications and Navigation Group for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Labs. While in the early days of spaceflight, I'm talking up until about the mid-1980s,

we certainly did support shuttle and space station. But over the last 15, nearly 20 years now, things like TDRS, the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, allows Shuttle and Space Station to converse back to Earth. So they don't need the big dishes that our stations provide anymore. So we literally just handle those things that leave the planet. Now, this will become important in the future for NASA, and I would make the

presumption now that for missions going back to the Moon and onward to Mars certainly if we're going to take that route as human beings, the Deep Space Network will be playing that communication role as we did in the Apollo

days. So we've actually got quite a lot to look forward to. We have so many new missions going out from so many different countries. Of course, we've got missions which are out there right now which don't arrive at their various destinations for a number of years, New Horizons being a key one, not arriving at Pluto until July 14, 2015, so we really plan ahead. Actually, interestingly, we've already worked out

that it'll actually be our station here in Canberra that brings the world the very first close-up pictures of Pluto, so that will be an exciting day here. Because we have so many legacy missions, the Voyages are still out there after 32 years. We're still in communication with both of them every single day. There's plenty to do, and we'll never run out of universe to explore. And I will mention your role to Alan Stern

who is a frequent guest of this radio show the leader of course of the New Horizons mission another mission we talk about all the time we check in regularly with Cassini out there at Saturn when you think of all of this science everything that we are learning about our solar system that is passing through the electronics that you guys are responsible for, that has to be almost as exciting as what we saw on the actors' faces

as they saw men step on the moon. Yeah, it's one thing that, certainly from the movie The Dish, when you see the people that worked in those places, there's an expression of their passion for what they're doing and the knowledge of this intimate role that they're playing in literally making history. That's what we do in the Deep Space Network every single day. You don't often hear about us. It's rarely thanked at a press conference or you really hear say, look at this great picture from Cassini at Saturn that came to you via the deep space network and that's mainly because we

do our jobs so well we we rarely make a mistake there's rarely a time anybody says well we've lost that mission or we lost that data or whatever because of the network and that's a great sense of pride that we have in what we do, and certainly that's something that is expressed well in that movie. What's wonderful about all of this stuff is that when we get all this data back, to us it's just ones and zeros. We don't know whether it's good data or bad data. It might be bad news from a spacecraft.

And we have a very technical piece of equipment out of all the incredible machinery that we have at these sites. Probably our most important piece of machinery is actually just a TV monitor watching the faces of the people at the Mission and Control Centers, particularly at the Jet Propulsion Labs,

seeing their reactions to the data that we're sending through. If you see happy faces and hugs and cheers and high fives, the data is good. Sad faces, it's a bad day at the office. So we call that the glee meter. What we like to see is the glee meter turned up to 11. Glenn, here's to many more happy faces generated by your work and your brothers and sisters around the world that are part of the Deep Space Network.

Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for all the terrific work you've done in helping us to learn much more about our corner of the galaxy. Thanks very much, Matt. I hope to speak to you again in the future. Glenn Nagel is the Education and Outreach Manager for CDSCC, the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex, which is part of NASA's Deep Space Network. Down there, well, he is, anyway, near Canberra in Australia. I'd love to visit sometime in person and shake your hand right there. I'd love to make one of those tours someday. Up next on Planetary Radio, Bruce Betts will be here with this week's edition of What's Up. Stay with us. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio.

Bruce Betts is at the other end of the Skype line. He's ready to tell us about the night sky. And I guess we're a little bit late for this latest meteor shower. We are, although it depends if people pick it up right as it comes out. The meteor shower Geminids are peaking on December 14th, so the day that it'll come out. shower. Geminids are peaking on December 14th, so the day that it'll come out. So if you're within, certainly within two or three days of that, there's going to be significantly increased meteor activity, and they even may spread a few days later. But it should be a great meteor shower this year because of the new moon. That would be the actual new moon, not the movie. Good dark sky.

A whole bunch of teenage girls out there in the audience suddenly perk right up, and then they were crestfallen. Well, maybe the movie's helping, too. I just don't know. Meteors coming in to try to see it. Teen vampire flick drives thousands of teenage girls to study astronomy. There you go. Other than that, in the night sky, we've got...

I'm so off my game now. We've got Mercury, actually. You might be able to check out low in the southwest in the twilight over towards the sun, but after sunset... Twilight, you just dropped that in as if nothing happened, didn't you? Too bad I don't have an eclipse to mention. Yeah, look a half hour, 40 minutes after sunset over in the west, and if you see a bright star-like object, it is probably Venus.

And we've got Jupiter still dominating the evening skies, the brightest star-like object up in the evening, and it can be found high in the south-southwest after sunset in the early evening. Mars coming more and more into the evening sky, rising around 8 or 9 p.m. in the east, looking bright and reddish. So if you look a little later than that, it'll be up in the east, looking good and brightening towards its opposition in late January. It's busy going on these days.

We also have Saturn rising around the middle of the night, shining high in the southeast before and during dawn. A breaking dawn. I didn't get it at first. Okay. On to this week in space history. In 1972, last footprints on the moon, Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. And in 1962 this week, Mariner 2 had the first ever planetary flyby, in this case of Venus. We move on to random space fact.

Nice approach. Thank you. I always appreciate your assessments. So here's a neat one. Looking at the Voyager project, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, if you look only at the period from its conception

through the flyby of Neptune in 1989, both these spacecrafts, still working, by the way, a total of 11,000 work years devoted to Voyager during that period. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the Great Pyramid. That's wonderful. Excellent. I wish I could say I calculated that, but this is according to a NASA

website. That's terrific, though. Thank you. You know how much I love those common-term comparisons analogy metaphors. Yes, the work unit of Pyramid of Giza, which is so well-known. It's the.33 Giza. All right, let's go on to the trivia contest. And we asked you about how far away from Earth is the Earth's sun, L1, the Lagrangian point. This is the gravitational balance point that's stable to stick a spacecraft in between the sun and the Earth. How'd we do, Matt? I am so pleased because I swear this was purely random.org's choice.

But someone is smiling on our friends down under because the winner is Lindsay Anderson. Excuse me. What am I saying? That was a great British director, Lindsay Dawson. Lindsay, who sends us these wonderful responses every week, who happens to be an Aussie. How appropriate with our guest today, Glenn Nagel. Lindsay said it's about, and in fact, he derived it, of course, because Lindsay doesn't settle for Wikipedia with this stuff. It's about one and a half million kilometers, one and a half million kilometers from here to that little trash dump in space. Exactamundo. So about four times the Earth-Moon distance, by the way. Well, Groovy, let's give another question here. Let's shift gears.

Who was the first chimpanzee to orbit the Earth? To orbit the Earth. First chimpanzee. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. I'm really puzzled because I thought I knew the answer to this, but now I'm not so sure. You've got until the 21st of December, Monday, December 21, at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Let's give away a shirt. I know we haven't done that in a few weeks. It's a Planetary Radio t-shirt. By the way, Lindsay's going to get a Mars Hug-A-Planet,

but this time a Planetary Radio t-shirt. If Random.org smiles on you, you've got the right answer. One other tidbit to throw in, Matt. I want to wish you and your wife happy anniversary. Oh. And a happy celebration. I hear there was quite the surprise party for you. Oh, what a day.

We picked up our daughter after she was done with study in England, and on the way back, we were completely fooled by both our daughters and our son-in-law and ended up in an anniversary party with lots of good folks there. I'm sorry you couldn't make it. I know you had other stuff going on, but I appreciate the good wishes. Good wishes to you. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about Matt's anniversary.

Thank you. Do I need to say it's a wedding anniversary? He's Bruce Betts, the director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week right here for What's Up. Next week, more on the LightSail project. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Keep looking up. Thank you.