Observatoire de Parkes

Parkes Observatory is a radio astronomy observatory, located north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia. It hosts Murriyang, the 64 m CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope also known as "The Dish", along with two smaller radio telescopes. The 64 m dish was one of several radio antennae used to receive live television images of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Its scientific contributions over the decades led the ABC to describe it as "the most successful scientific instrument ever built in Australia" after 50 years of operation. The Parkes Observatory is run by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), as part of the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) network of radio telescopes. It is frequently operated together with other CSIRO radio telescopes, principally the array of six dishes at the Australia Telescope Compact Array near Narrabri, and a single dish at Mopra (near Coonabarabran), to form a very long baseline interferometry array. The observatory was included on the Australian National Heritage List on 10 August 2020. The Parkes Radio Telescope, completed in 1961, was the brainchild of E. G. "Taffy" Bowen, chief of the CSIRO's Radiophysics Laboratory. During the Second World War, he had worked on radar development in the United States and had made connections in its scientific community. Calling on this old boy network, he persuaded two philanthropic organisations, the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation, to fund half the cost of the telescope. It was this recognition and key financial support from the United States that persuaded Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, to agree to fund the rest of the project. The Parkes site was chosen in 1956, as it was accessible, but far enough from Sydney to have clear skies. Additionally the mayor Ces Moon and landowner Australia James Helm were both enthusiastic about the project. The success of the Parkes telescope led NASA to copy the basic design in their Deep Space Network, with matching dishes built at Goldstone, California, Madrid, Spain, and Tidbinbilla, near Canberra in Australia.