Frequently Asked Questions

No. This is a great scene in the movie 'The Dish' but it just doesn't happen in real life. The dish surfaces have to be a very accurate parabolic shape and any dents from cricket balls or walking on it would reduce the quality of signals we receive from spacecraft.

When the antennas are at stow (pointing straight up), the antennas are either offline for maintenance, when staff are busy doing preventative checks or upgrades, or the antenna has finished communicating with one spacecraft and is getting ready to communicate with another. This is the only time when people can be on the dish surface and they have to stick to certain paths to avoid causing surface damage.

An interesting side note is that in the early days of the tracking station, the current site of the big dish was the location of the staff's original cricket pitch at Tidbinbilla.

No, the dish at Parkes is 64-metres in diameter, while our DSS-43 antenna is 70-metres in diameter. DSS-43 was originally built as a 64-metre antenna, but was upgraded in the late 1980s as a 70-metre for Voyager 2's encounters with Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989).

Deep Space Station 46 (DSS-46), the antenna located closest to the public carpark at the front of the Complex, brought back the first images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon on 21 July 1969. When the antenna received these images, it was located at the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, in the south of Canberra. That Tracking Station was closed in 1981 and its dish relocated to the Tidbinbilla station to support deep space missions.

DSS-46 was retired from service at the end of 2009. It remains here as a permanent monument to those missions of the past and to the hundreds of men and women who worked on them.

We are located in a valley to avoid the interference of "human made noise" that can affect the data we receive back from a spacecraft, as the data has travelled a long way.

About 85 staff are employed at the Complex. About 18 are shift teams who operate the antennas during daylight hours, not only here in Canberra, but also at our sister stations located in Spain and California. The Complex is staffed 24 hours a day, sven days a week. Our other staff work across the Complex and includes technicians, engineers, electricians, administration, facilities maintenance, logisticians, ground maintenance, cooks, cleaners and public relations.

The Complex is funded entirely from NASA's space exploration budget.

NASA's Deep Space Network - DSN - is an international network of antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploration of the Solar System and the universe. The Network also supports some selected Earth-orbiting science missions.

The DSN consists of three deep-space communications facilities placed approximately 120 degrees apart around the world: near Canberra, Australia; Goldstone, in California's Mojave Desert ; and near Madrid, Spain . This strategic placement permits constant observation of spacecraft as the Earth rotates, and helps to make the DSN the largest and most sensitive scientific telecommunications system in the world.

The antennas or 'dishes' provide two-way radio contact with dozens of robotic spacecraft exploring the Solar System and beyond. When not sending commands to these probes or receiving the data and images they collect, our antennas are busy either being checked, having maintenance performed on them or testing new tracking techniques.

In our spare time, as part of the international agreement between Australia and the United States, we get to use the antennas for radio astronomy science and will often link our big dish to other dishes across Australia, notably Parkes and Narrabri, to create one giant antenna that can provide incredible detail of distant stars, galaxies and black holes.

There are four operational antennas on site - Deep Space Station 43 (70-metres in diameter), Deep Space Station 34, 35 and 36 (each 34m in diameter). The other dishes are inactive and have been decommissioned.

CSIRO is responsible for the management and operations of the Complex on behalf of NASA.

The Space and Astronomy business unit brings together CSIRO's radio astronomy capabilities at the Parkes Radio Telescope (NSW), the Australia Telescope Compact Array (Narrabri, NSW), Murchison Radio Observatory (Boolardy, WA), the operation of Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (ACT), and the European Space Agency’s tracking facility (New Norcia, WA).

Within CSIRO, the unit includes: technologies, science and operations for radio astronomy; Square Kilometre Array telescope operations; and AquaWatch Australia. As Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO manages CDSCC in Australia on behalf of NASA and JPL.

No. Our role is only to communicate with uncrewed, robotic interplanetary missions in deep space that have a scientific job to do.

No, the International Space Station has its own communication systems relaying through orbiting satellites directly to mission control. Our big dishes are also not needed for something so close to Earth.