This week’s word of the week is the Dish. No, we aren’t prepping for dinner, we are journeying out to the New South Wales Central West to visit the famous Parkes radio telescope. Opened in 1961, the Dish is a powerful radio telescope with a subsidiary telescope.
The Dish is best known for the role it played in the 1969 moon landing. It beamed the signal from the Hollywood studio where the landing was filmed to our TV screens. Kidding! Sort of. The Dish actually did relay images of the first moon landing to television viewers around the world, a story told in the 2000 film The Dish, starring Sam Neill. That’s not the telescope’s only achievement. In 1981 it enabled the first discovery of pulsar stars outside the Milky Way!
The Dish also forms part of a major link in the Australia Telescope’s network of eight dishes. Yes, from telescopes to dark sky parks and space launches, Australia plays an important role in astronomy research and the global space industry.
