AS the Rosetta spacecraft’s Philae probe began its descent towards comet 67P in the early hours of November 12 2014, news crews lined the streets outside the European Space Agency’s office in Darmstadt, Germany, hoping to catch a glimpse of the landing.
By the following day, photographs from the historic deep-space success a decade in the making featured heavily in newspapers and on television screens around the globe.
Few would have been aware those images had been received by a 35-metre antenna in the small Wheatbelt town of New Norcia, about 140 kilometres north-east of Perth.
The New Norcia Station was constructed in 2000 to provide vital communications, tracking and data download to the ESA, one of just three tracking stations in its global network.
In the two decades since, the site, now managed by CSIRO, has aided the Venus Express, several missions to Mars and a spacecraft creating a threedimensional catalogue of the galaxy.
However, the New Norcia facility is set to enter a new era, with construction beginning on a second antenna to support the ESA’s missions to Jupiter’s moons and the sun, and a wide-scale investigation into dark matter.
Weighing 620 tonnes, the new, ultra-sensitive antenna features cutting-edge communication technology capable of increasing data returns by up to 40 per cent and detecting signals weaker than those from a mobile phone on Mars.
In the future, the ESA hopes to connect and sychronise the two antennas, emulating a 70-metre dish and allowing the agency to reach further into space.
Since joining the ESA as its first software engineer more than 36 years ago, Yves Doat has witnessed the commercialisation of space exploration and a drastic increase in demand for ground support.
Now spearheading the agency’s ground-station infrastructure and operations division, Mr Doat told Business News there were few locations on the planet better placed to facilitate that support than New Norcia.
“When I joined, we had one antenna supporting one spacecraft per week; we were deploying facilities that were rarely used,” Mr Doat said.
“Now, we have spacecraft everywhere, it has become commercial, and we have had to completely transform our mode of operation.
“What they’re doing at New Norcia, it is really impressive.
“We decided to do this now because of the current load, because it clearly cannot support our deep space network.
“New Norcia is a fantastic location; it’s not far away from Perth, it is not very populated, it’s accessible in the day and there is no pollution.
“Not to mention we have our first antenna here and existing infrastructure.”
The COVID pandemic and the subsequent travel restrictions highlighted the importance of maintaining the agency’s extensive infrastructure network and having the necessary capacity.
During the past two years, the agency has had more success accessing distant parts of space than it did penetrating the hard border separating Western Australia from the rest of the world.
The agency was forced to shift missions being tracked by an antenna in WA to an antenna in Argentina, after being prevented from undertaking renewal works on assets at risk of failure for two years.
“It was a very difficult situation for us, because we had to tell our missions we would have to kick them out as soon as we got into Australia because we needed to make an urgent intervention on the antenna,” Mr Doat said.
However, he insisted the situation had little if any impact on the agency’s desire to do business with Australia.
In fact, it appears to have had the opposite effect.
“Over the past few years, we have developed very good connections with the Australian Space Agency,” Mr Doat told Business News.
“We have been in contact monthly during COVID and trying to find areas for potential collaboration of interest to both parties.”
ESA’s Australian counterpart has shown its support for the new antenna project by contributing more than $4.4 million, a move tipped to further strengthen ties between the two agencies.
That financial contribution has earned ASA the title of ‘co-financier’, which is set to help it gain access to and learn how ESA manages, validates and brings into operation a project of that scale.
In addition, more than one third of the cost of the project is being spent with local contractors, bolstering the state’s technical capability in the sector.
The timing of the project appears serendipitous, with the state government having recently poured millions of dollars into the sector in a bid to improve WA’s footing as a leading space capital.
During a recent visit to Perth, representatives from ESA met with the state government and a few of the state’s universities to review potential opportunities for collaboration amid a flurry of homegrown space exploration projects.
Among them was the Binar-1 satellite project, the first made in WA to be launched into space.
The satellite will be followed by six more, aimed at helping Curtin University achieve its goal of taking WA to the Moon by 2025.
Mr Doat said the ESA was also keen to explore further collaboration projects with Kensington-based Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and ascertain whether its computing system could be used to deploy software capable of controlling a spacecraft.
The progression of these homegrown projects coincides with the development of the world’s largest radio telescope in the state’s Murchison region, which could soon deliver WA a better vantage point to see space than anywhere on the planet.
The rapidly evolving commercialisation of space exploration has helped the Australian space sector to almost quadruple its revenue to $5.1 billion between 2009-2010 and 2018-2019.
ESA station operations engineer Guillermo Lorenzo Ten said the sector was evolving rapidly, aided by that commercialisation.
“We are living in a moment that is very dynamic for the space sector,” he said.
“With the emergence of commercial companies in the space sector, we will now have about 40 missions flying to the moon courtesy of 10 different agencies, but that’s not possible without cooperation.
“Change in the sector is moving really fast; it’s changing drastically from Monday to Thursday.”
It’s a growing sector Mr Doat believes WA-based space exploration aspirants could take advantage of, with the latest New Norcia expansion project being viewed as an opportunity to increase local knowledge on the ground.
“I believe we can make use of the New Norcia site for other projects,” he said.
“I’m convinced there is the capacity to work cooperatively and make use of the New Norcia assets.
“Space is enormous, the universe is infinite; there is enough room for everybody.
“We have no interest in keeping a monopoly in Europe; we are looking more for cooperation.
“We believe that we can learn from Australia.”
The construction of the antenna is due to be completed in late 2024 for an operational launch in 2025.
