Light years – silverfox175

About an hour and a half from Cowra is Parkes, so name after Henry Parkes in 1873 later Sir Henry Parkes.

Sir Henry in the town centre of Parkes.

Parkes is now famous for the radio telescope that is located just outside of the town.

It was built in 1961, but only the basic structure has remained. All of the electronics, control, cabling etc has been updated regularly and the Parkes Radio Telescope is now ten thousand time more sensitive than when it first started in 1961.

The design of the telescope was copied by NASA for the tracking dishes of its Deep Space Network.

The dish and the other moving parts weigh one million kilos (approx 1000 tons). The diameter of the dish is 64 metres (70 yards).

The dish is a receiver it never sends outbound signals – it is a listening unit.

The dish can be tilted to a maximum of 60 degrees, which take five minutes to complete.

The above photo is by David Crosling

Students can control the telescope over the internet.

The telescope is used 85% of the time, which allows time for maintenance – less than 5% is lost due to high winds. If the wind is greater than 35 km / hour (about 22 mph) the dish is pointed straight up. 

During the Apollo 11 mission the Parkes Dish was the prime receiving station and during the Moon walk the Parke’s dish had to contend with wind gusting at over 100 km per hour, and the Director had to give special permission for the dish to operate.
The Dish was involved in further Apollo missions – 12, 14, 15, and 17.  It was called on to help during the Apollo 13 emergency.

This telescope, in partnership with Jodrell Bank (UK) & the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia (US) discovered in 2003, the only known system of two pulsars. The Parkes telescope has an accuracy of 11 arcseconds, which is about the width of a finger seen at a distance of 150 mtrs (164 yards).If you are interested in the details of double pulsars – who isn’t? . . . . . check out the link below – after reading it a few times I think I grasped a little.

Check if I am correct