#CSIROTweetup wrap-up and learning about Canberra Deep Space Communication Centre

It's about time I put together a wrap-up of the CSIRO Tweetup I most was fortunate to be a part of in November, for the launch of the Mars Curiosity Rover.

Here is the official CDSCC summary of the weekend's proceedings. The launch went beautifully, as these gorgeous photos showed. Space.com also has some great shots of the launch day and the companion NASA Tweetup.

A nice poster designed by Tweeup co-organiser
CSIRO's Glen Nagle (@astro0_umsf)

Tweetup co-organiser extraordinaire Vanessa Hill (@nessyhill) has written about the genesis of the event and the fun (?) of pulling it all together.

We had some great talks by several Australian space scientists and engineers.

Probably everyone's favourite speaker was Marion Anderson, an Australian geologist who helped select Curiosity's landing site. Here's a great summary of her talk by fellow Tweep Patty Jansen (@pattyjansen).

Here's Patty's summary of the presentation on the Grace satellites, again with important work being done by Australian scientists and engineers.

Here's another summary by fellow Tweep Kevin Orrman-Rossiter (@lucidkevinor).

And Ed Brown (@reallyedbrown)has used Storify to summarise his tweets over the weekend.

The amazing reach of the Tweetup readership helps you
realise why NASA does them! 5% of the population!

Here's Tweetup Central - a.k.a. the CDSCC Tourist Centre, which we virtually took over for the weekend. It's a radio quiet zone, so the staff set up desktops that we could share. A little hard to capture the immediacy that is Twitter when you have four people taking turns on each computer though! (Pic: Ruth Ellison)

And that would be me, uploading a photo of the dishes to Twitter.
Eh what's that? We weren't supposed to plug
devices into the computers? Shh! (Pic: Ruth again)

The dish tracking schedule, and what we were there for
- the Mars Science Laboratory launch!

There were also several tours of the CDSCC conducted by Glen Nagle. The common theme almost throughout the weekend was the rain...

Here Glen describes the main 70 metre dish (source Gerry Tye). He also talks about the critical role played by the (now abandoned) Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station in the broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, and what part The Dish at Parkes really played. Note the alien sounds being broadcast out of the dish building?

In this piece, Glen describes the dishes that were to receive the first signals from Curiosity as it was boosted into escape velocity (source: Gerry Tye, spot the smart alec questions from yours truly near the end):



In this clip, Glen talks about the Control Centre building. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to film inside the Control Room itself. Apparently NASA is worried people could inadvertently capture their transmission frequencies - although as he admitted, they are easily obtainable through other means! Source: Gerry Tye again.)

Of course no sooner was I home, than the kids raided my space booty.
Here they are building our own Square Metre Array.