CSIRO PARKES OBSERVATORY

The Parkes radio telescope is mythical for astronomy enthusiasts. Its giant antenna is indeed emblematic of another kind of astronomy, the one that consists in listening to the stars. Located on the outskirts of the town of Parkes, 380 km from Sydney, it is one of the three instruments that make up the Australian National Telescope Facility. With a diameter of 64 m, it is one of the largest telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere dedicated to astronomy. It took 3 years to design and 2 years to build. Its inauguration took place on October 31, 1961. The mobile part of the telescope, above the concrete tower, weighs more than 1 000 tons! Because of its considerable wind load (the surface of the antenna is more than 3,200 m²!), it must imperatively be put in rest position, pointed towards the zenith, when the wind speed exceeds 35 km/h. The telescope works twenty-four hours a day, even when the weather is cloudy and it rains. Over the course of a year, it is used about 85% of the time, the rest being divided between maintenance and test periods, and days or nights when the wind is too strong. Since 1961, it has been continuously improved through upgrading programs concerning the elements that make up its receiving surface, its control system, its receivers, its computers, etc., so much so that its antenna is today 10,000 times more sensitive than when it was commissioned! The Parkes radio telescope has become the flagship of Australian science. Its large receiving area makes it very sensitive, ideal for listening to and studying certain stars such as pulsars, which have the characteristic of rotating on themselves at high speed. Many of the pulsars discovered to date have been discovered through the Parkes telescope. But its observing capabilities do not stop there, and it has helped find more than 2,500 new galaxies! The other thing that made this radio telescope famous is that it was for a long time under contract with NASA and other international space agencies to track and receive data from spacecraft... In the 2000s, he continued to work on Mars exploration missions, as well as on the European Space Agency's famous Cassini-Huygens space mission, which included landing a module on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. More recently, Parkes played a supporting role in tracking NASA's Curiosity robot as it descended to the surface of Mars.