January 17, 2010

The Infamous Parkes Dish


Our team stumbled upon a special site of American history the other day.  Who would have thought anything significant could come out of middle-of-nowhere Parkes, Australia? 


Parkes is a farming town in southern hemisphere of the continent.  Its climate is much cooler than Townsville, and the dry air reminds me of home!  This place is also the hometown of Ken Mulligan, our base director (picture below).  For the last day and a half, our team of 43 has stayed with his family and friends in the community.  It’s the first time in over 20 years the Ken has been able to bring any DTS students or staff to his home, so we celebrated on Sunday night with a great big family style barbeque.  It was really special!


On Sunday afternoon, we drove past the farms in the area until we arrived at an enormous satellite dish.  It turns out this dish is famous for broadcasting the moment when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon on July 21st, 1969.  Apparently there were three satellite dishes that were initially picking up pictures of the moon’s broadcast, but after 8 minutes in, Houston control station switched to the Parkes dish which had the clearest shot of the moon for the two and a half hour broadcast.  Remember the famous words, “One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind?” You can thank the Parkes dish in Australia for capturing that moment.  Cool eh? And random…


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