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A highlight of the Roof of Australia tour in the Australian Alps, is a visit to the NASA Deep Space Network Tracking Station at Tidbinbilla and the remains of the Honeysuckle Creek Manned Space Flight Network Tracking Station, which played a critical role in the Apollo 11 First Man on The Moon Mission.
December 2009
“The Eagle has landed”
“One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”
These words, uttered on July 20 1969 by Neil Armstrong as he touched down and then became the first man to set foot on the Moon, transfixed the world.
The time and date in eastern Australia was actually 12.56pm on Monday July 21.
I still remember much of that day when, as a young teenager, I and my schoolmates were allowed to go home early to watch the historic moment on television (still black and white in those days in Australia!). I was no nerd or science geek but it was apparent that something extraordinary was happening and it acted to fill us with the hope and promise of a world in which almost anything was possible.
As Armstrong made his small step and giant leap, 400,000 kilometres away an estimated 600 million people watched his space-suited figure step onto an alien yet familiar world.
Technically speaking, Australians were the very first people on earth to witness the event and they enjoyed superior picture quality. Because of the role of Australian space tracking stations and the delays and degradation inherent in television relays, Australian viewers received the best video images about 300 milliseconds before the rest of the world – including Mission Control in Houston, Texas.
In fact, the pictures would not have been seen at all were it not for the role played by three Australian tracking stations – Parkes, Tidbinbilla and Honeysuckle Creek – the latter of which was the primary receiving and broadcasting point for the critical moments as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin emerged from the Lunar Module (‘Eagle’) and onto the surface of the moon.
Many who have seen the Australian movie The Dish may assume that Parkes was the place where the first pictures were received. The truth is that Parkes, though it had superior picture quality, did not come on-line until more than eight minutes into the 2½-hour broadcast, after which their signal, demodulated at Honeysuckle, was what the world gazed upon for the remainder of the moon walk.
The tracking station at Tidbinbilla had been planned as the major link. But at the eleventh hour things went wrong; the transmitter supplied to Tidbinbilla blew up before the mission started and, despite the fact that the engineers (headed by Alan Blake, an ex-RAN survivor of the Voyager naval disaster) repaired it very quickly with the aid of parts from the Woomera tracking station, Mission Control decided to switch the support of the lunar module from Tidbinbilla to Honeysuckle.
Honeysuckle (known as HSK) undeniably received and broadcast the first steps and so its role in history is secure as the conduit for the world’s indelibly-stained memory of the moment.
To support the Apollo Program, NASA’s Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN), based at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, commissioned three 26-metre antennae – equally spaced around the world. These included Goldstone in California, Fresnedillas near Madrid in Spain and Honeysuckle Creek in the Australian Capital Territory.
These stations added to existing Deep Space Network (DSN) stations such as the one at Tidbinbilla, 20kms north of Honeysuckle Creek, which had additional equipment installed to allow them to track Apollo spacecraft. These Deep Space stations were ‘wing stations’ and acted as second antenna to the three MSFN prime stations.
At various stages during the Apollo missions, the 64m (210') Mars antenna at Goldstone and the 64m Parkes Radio Telescope were called in to assist.
In addition, a number of other stations supported Apollo – including 9m antennae around the world, notably at Carnarvon in Western Australia – as well as tracking ships and the ARIA (Apollo Range Instrumented Aircraft) fleet.
Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station (HSK) was built by the Australian Government between February 1965 and December 1966 at a cost of around $A2 million (1966 dollars) to build and had an annual running budget of $A1.25 million. It was officially opened on 17 March 1967.
The Honeysuckle Creek site was close enough to Canberra for staff to commute but isolated enough to be shielded from man-made “radio noise”. Surrounded by bushland and native fauna, Honeysuckle was arguably the most peaceful setting for any NASA tracking station.
The photo below, taken from the Telstra Tower on Black Mountain in Canberra, gives an idea of both the proximity of Honeysuckle to the city and also the ruggedness of the terrain of the Australian Alps
Suburban Woden is in the left foreground. Mount Taylor is the hill between Woden and the distant mountains. The devastating bushfires of January 2003 affected a huge area of the Alps, including Mt. Tennent and the Honeysuckle site – and even came over Mount Taylor into suburban Canberra.
Photo: Colin Mackellar, October 2003.
Honeysuckle Creek was just a mountain ridge away from the Orroral Valley Tracking Station – built as a STADAN (Satellite Tracking and Data Network) site – which later played an important role in the Apollo-Soyuz mission. It supported the Apollo Program through its work with scientific payloads, notably the ALSEP (Apollo Lunar Science Equipment Package) equipment left on the Moon by Apollo 11.
Honeysuckle was managed by the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland and was run by Standard Telephones & Cables Pty Ltd (STC) and later Fairey Australia, on behalf of the Commonwealth Department of Supply.
Engineers, technicians, computer specialists and many others were recruited to run the station. Around 90 people worked at Honeysuckle during the Apollo Program and a little over 100 during Skylab.
All of the equipment was shipped in from the US. While the equipment came from NASA, the local team was responsible for running the station.
The reasons behind Honeysuckle Creek’s historic role was encapsulated by the then Station Director, Tom Reid:
“There were four contingencies which resulted in Honeysuckle Creek being the station which sent the picture of Neil Armstrong’s footstep around the world.
First of all the original Flight Plan called for the egress to occur when the Goldstone and Parkes 64 metre antennas were in view, so there would be 100 per cent redundancy in 64 metre antennas. Armstrong, however decided to come out early, and the Mission Controllers decided they wouldn’t oppose that. Because of that, when they actually did come out Parkes didn’t have a view because they had an elevation constraint, only able to come down to 29° 38’ above the horizon (the moon wasn’t high enough for the Lunar Module’s signals to enter their main beam).
Unfortunately at the same time there was a problem at Goldstone, and they were sending a poor quality, slow-scan, upside-down TV picture back. Due to the transmitter failure earlier at Tidbinbilla, Honeysuckle Creek was tracking the Lunar Module.”
Eight minutes or so after the television was switched on, the CSIRO’s 64-metre antenna at Parkes came on line at 1302 AEST (1.02pm in eastern Australia) when the Lunar Module on the moon rose high enough above the horizon for its signal to enter the main feed of Parkes’ big dish, providing a large increase in signal strength over the Honeysuckle signal.
At this time, staff at Parkes were hunched over their controls, concentrating on following the Lunar Modules’s signals while around them they could hear alarm bells, creaks and thumps as the motors tried to hold the antenna against the onslaught of an enormous wind storm outside that was tearing at the dish.
Worried staff wondered how much punishment the antenna could take but kept going. When a clear picture appeared on their screens from the main feed at Parkes, Sydney Video (OTC’s facility supplying pictures to Houston and the rest of the world) switched to the Parkes signal and remained with those pictures for the rest of the two-and-a-half hour broadcast.
But the first moments had belonged to Honeysuckle Creek, nestled in a quiet bush valley high in the mountains south of Canberra.
Armstrong commented during their moon walk:
“It’s a great honour and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations, and with interest and a curiosity and a vision for the future. It’s an honour for us to be able to participate here today.”
Of course, it was also an honour for Honeysuckle Creek and its people and Australia generally to have played a vital role in the mission and in relaying its historic pictures to the world.
For a riveting account of the Apollo 11 Moon Mission and Honeysuckle Creek’s role from the point of view of an insider, it is worth reading the Essay by Hamish Lindsay, a senior technical officer at Honeysuckle Creek, at: www.honeysucklecreek.net/msfn_missions/Apollo_11_mission/index.html
(warning: the account is dramatic, even for a layman, but there are some technical passages and jargon).
Honeysuckle Creek continued to play a vital role in subsequent Apollo Missions and the Skylab program. In 1974 at the conclusion of the Skylab and Manned Space Flight activities, Honeysuckle Creek joined NASA’s Deep Space Network as Deep Space Station 44. After the site closed in December 1981, the 26-metre antenna was relocated to Tidbinbilla, renamed Deep Space Station 46 and used for spacecraft positioned close to the Earth. It is still in use today, although from 2009 it has ceased to play a role in regular scheduled operations.
Tidbinbilla tracking station is now the only NASA tracking station still operational in Australia (Woomera closed in 1972 and Carnarvon in 1974). Opened on 19 March 1965, Tidbinbilla was developed for communicating with deep space probes and to add support to the early manned missions and is now a vital link in NASA’s worldwide Deep Space Network.
After it closed in 1981, Honeysuckle Creek tracking station site lay abandoned and, in its remote location, the buildings were badly vandalised until the ACT government decided to demolish them. It wasn’t until 2000 that a permanent display to mark the site was built. The Honeysuckle memorial consists of several displays in various spots on the foundations of the Operations building. In addition, there is a steel spire where the antenna was.
Photo of Honeysuckle Creek taken in October 2003 – note the trees burnt by the January 2003 bushfires. The mound where the antenna was is on the left. (Panorama: Colin Mackellar)
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Sources:
Lindsay, Hamish, A Tribute To Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station (Online, 2009) -
www.honeysucklecreek.net
Dinn, Mike, The Truth About The Dish (Online, 2009 -
members.pcug.org.au/~mdinn/TheDish/
Sarkissian, John, On Eagle's Wings: The Parkes Observatory's Support of the Apollo 11 Mission (Online, 2009) - www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/
Saxon, John, Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station (Online, 2009) -
www.jsaxon.org/space/hsk/index.htm
Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex -
www.cdscc.nasa.gov
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, "Footprints On The Moon" (Quantum; online archive, 2009) - www.abc.net.au/science/moon/footprints.htm
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