SETI public: Parkes Radio Observatory gets a $3 million boost for 2004 probe coverage

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http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,7729156%5E15391%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

$3m helps dish up life on Mars
John Kerin
NOVEMBER 01, 2003

IT'S rush hour near Mars and the radio telescope immortalised in the film The Dish is again playing a starring role.

The frantic rush to gather information from seven probes either landing on Mars or circling the red planet over the coming months has led NASA to pay for a $3 million upgrade of the dish at Parkes, in western NSW.
"If you were comparing what's happening near Mars now to a traffic problem, it is about 5.15 pm in Sydney at the moment - it's rush hour," CSIRO official Warren King said at the launch yesterday of the upgraded dish.
"The number of space probes that are coinciding around Mars in the next few months is quite phenomenal, from NASA, the Europeans and the Japanese."
Among the spacecraft heading to Mars are the two robotic exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity, scheduled to land in January, Japan's Nozomi and the European Space Agency's Mars Express.
>From Monday, the CSIRO facility at Parkes will begin tracking craft near Mars for up to eight hours a day as part of the NASA program.
And, despite what was depicted in the 2000 Australian film The Dish, Tom Schieffer became the first US ambassador to visit the facility yesterday.
Amid 110 km/h winds - 10 times stronger than it was built to withstand - the dish relayed television pictures of the July 21, 1969 moon landing to 600 million people.
The weather yesterday was uncannily like the violent squalls on that day.
In a case of life imitating art, Mr Schieffer played cricket on the surface of the 64m parabolic dish with the CSIRO officials and NASA's Australian representative Neal Newman - re-enacting a scene from the movie.
The telescope was buffeted by driving rain and high winds of up to 70 km/h as Mr Schieffer and an entourage from NASA and CSIRO executives clambered up on to it.
Mr Schieffer said he first heard of "the dish" in April 2001 after US President George W. Bush asked him to be Australia's ambassador.
"I went back to Dallas that weekend and of all things that were playing that week at the theatre was The Dish.
"We went to see it and I knew this (being ambassador to Australia) was going to be a lot of fun," he said.

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