The mission is managed by NASA with operational support from NOAA and its Joint Polar Satellite System, which manages the satellite's ground system. The polar-orbiting satellite flies 824 kilometers (512 miles) above the surface, sending its data once per orbit to a ground station in Svalbard, Norway, and continuously to local direct broadcast users distributed around the world. Named for satellite meteorology pioneer Verner Suomi, NPP flies over any given point on Earth's surface twice each day at roughly 1:30 a.m. “City lights are an excellent means to track urban and suburban growth, which feeds into planning for energy use and urban hazards, for studying urban heat islands, and for initializing climate models.” “Night time imagery provides an intuitively graspable view of our planet,” says William Stefanov, a scientist in NASA’s International Space Station program office who has worked with similar images from astronauts. ![]() In this case, auroras, fires, and other stray light have been removed to emphasize the city lights. VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. The nighttime view was made possible by the new satellite’s “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. The new data was mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet. The weather was still bad, and the telescope operated well beyond its safety limits.This image of Asia and Australia at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. Eight minutes later the Moon was in the Parkes main detector's field-of-view and NASA switched to Parkes. Fortunately the wind slowed, and Buzz Aldrin activated the TV camera just as the Moon came into the telescope's field-of-view.Īt this time, Honeysuckle Creek was taking the main signal. They made the control room shudder, and slammed the telescope back against its zenith axis gears. The telescope was fully tipped over, waiting for the Moon to rise, when a series of strong wind gusts – 110 km per hour – hit. The astronauts were slow getting into their suits and when they got outside the Moon was rising over Parkes. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were supposed to rest before the Moonwalk, but Neil Armstrong was keen to get going. ![]() ![]() The lunar module had landed at 6.17am AEST. While the Parkes telescope successfully received the signals, the occasion didn't go without a hitch. (The Tidbinbillla deep space tracking station, today known as the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, provided support to the command module in lunar orbit.)Įight 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 radio 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.ĬSIRO's Parkes radio telescope in 1969, around the time of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Although many people think the Parkes telescope was the only station receiving the signal, it was the 26-metre antenna at NASA's Honeysuckle Creek space tracking station near Canberra that was the prime station assigned with receiving the initial TV pictures from the Moon and Neil Armstrong's first steps on the lunar surface. Our Parkes radio telescope famously supported receiving the television signals on that momentous day. Prime Minister John Gorton at Honeysuckle Creek during the Apollo 11 Moon landing.Ĭommonwealth of Australia (National Archives of Australia) 2013Īt 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.
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