When Australia’s Parkes radio telescope helped capture NASA’s Apollo 11 landing video: ‘Two Americans walking on moon’

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, at the Quad Cancer Moonshot event on Sunday, remembered the time when the Australian radio telescope in Parkes carried the images of a "defining moment in human history" to "Tokyo and Osaka, New Delhi and Chennai, Wilmington and Washington DC".

Speaking at the event on Sunday, he was quoted in an official press release as saying, "In 1969, seven years after President Kennedy called on his fellow Americans to organise and measure the best of their abilities to meet an unprecedented challenge, the world watched as two Americans walked on the moon."

On July 20, 1969, NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to land on the moon. “At 12.56 pm on 21 July 1969 Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST), mankind took its 'one giant leap' and 600 million people watched as Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon,” the CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, said.

"Australians will always be proud of the part we played in sharing that triumph of science and human courage with the world," Albanese said during the event held on September 21 in the US.

Parkes radio telescope, Murriyang, was added to the National Heritage List – "the first functioning scientific instrument to join the list," the CSIRO said in a post on X in 2020. It had said that Murriyang, “our Parkes radio telescope, has been in operation for over 60 years.”

Murriyang-Apollo 11 connection

Murriyang, the Parkes radio telescope, along with NASA's antenna at Honeysuckle Creek near Canberra, played a key role in televising "one of humanity's most significant achievements".

In July 1969, Murriyang was the prime receiving station for the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. It supported the Apollo 11 Mission, relaying images of the moon landing to the world. Murriyang “famously supported receiving the television signals on that momentous day.”

The fictional film 'The Dish' was based on the real role that the telescope played in receiving video footage of the first Moon walk by the crew of Apollo 11.

The Australia's national science agency explained that “eight and a half minutes after those first historic images were broadcast around the world”, the television signal being received by the larger 64-metre Parkes telescope was then selected by NASA to provide the images for the following two hours and 12 minutes of live broadcast as the Apollo 11 astronauts explored the Moon surface.

It was built between 1959-1961. The Parkes Observatory was one of the first radio telescopes built as a big, movable dish. "Its design now seems standard, but it certainly wasn’t inevitable," the CSIRO said.

According to the CSIRO, in 1962, the telescope tracked the first interplanetary space mission, Mariner 2, as it flew by the planet Venus. "Most recently, in 2018-19, the telescope supported NASA's Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in receiving data from Voyager 2 as the spacecraft crossed into interstellar space," the CSIRO said.