Parkes Observatory
Interesting facts
- Continuous upgrades have made the dish around 10,000 times more sensitive than it was when it was first switched on in 1961.
- The first fast radio burst ever identified, found in 2007 in recordings made here in 2001, lasted less than five milliseconds.
- Parkes was the main control and receiving station for the European Giotto probe, which flew past Halley's Comet in 1986.
- For the Apollo missions an 18-metre companion dish on rails, moved by a tractor engine, sent the uplink signals, because the great dish can only receive.
- Its 13-horn multibeam receiver, chilled to about minus 200 degrees Celsius, carried out the largest blind survey of galaxies by their hydrogen radio signal, from 1997 to 2002.
- Its first southern-sky survey in the mid-1960s catalogued more than 2,000 radio sources, among them many previously unknown quasars.
- Parkes has helped track spacecraft from Mariner 2 and the Voyagers to Cassini, and in April 2026 it followed the crewed Artemis II flight around the Moon.
- The telescope was the largest steerable dish in the Southern Hemisphere until 1987, when NASA's antenna at Tidbinbilla near Canberra was enlarged to 70 metres.
- In 1964 the dish starred in the opening titles of The Stranger, the first science-fiction television series ever produced in Australia.
- Parkes is one of the instruments of Breakthrough Listen, searching the Milky Way's plane and about a thousand nearby stars for signals from alien technology.
Why it is worth it
The Parkes radio telescope rises from the open farmland of central New South Wales, a 64-metre dish that tilts and turns to follow the sky. Its surface has a distinctive two-tone look, smooth solid aluminium in the centre and perforated panels towards the rim, and the focus cabin hangs on three struts 27 metres above the bowl. Completed in 1961, it was one of the first large steerable dishes in the world, and in 2020 it received the Wiradjuri name Murriyang, after the home in the stars of the creator spirit Biyaami.
The telescope was the project of E. G. "Taffy" Bowen, head of the CSIRO's Radiophysics Laboratory, who used his wartime radar contacts in the United States to persuade the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation to pay half its cost; Prime Minister Robert Menzies agreed to fund the rest. The site near Parkes was chosen in 1956, accessible but far enough from Sydney for clean radio skies. The engineer Barnes Wallis designed its guiding system, in which a small equatorially mounted master telescope inside the structure steers the great altazimuth dish. NASA borrowed features of the design for the 64-metre dishes of its Deep Space Network.
Parkes is best known for July 1969. During the Apollo 11 moonwalk the dish operated outside its safety limits in gusts of more than 100 km/h, and a little under nine minutes into the broadcast, once the Moon had risen high enough for the main receiver, the world's television switched to the Parkes signal and stayed with it for the rest of the two and a half hours because the pictures were so much clearer. The episode was fictionalised in the 2000 film The Dish. The scientific record is just as remarkable: lunar occultations observed here in 1962 pinned down the position of 3C 273 and led to the recognition of quasars; more than half of all known pulsars were found with this dish; and the first fast radio burst was discovered in its archived data. It even solved a mystery of its own making, when puzzling signals called perytons turned out in 2015 to come from staff opening the door of the kitchen microwave oven too early.
The observatory is run by the CSIRO and was added to the National Heritage List in 2020. At the visitors centre you can watch the dish move while it works, with exhibits on the telescope's history, astronomy and space science, and a 3-D theatre.
Getting there
The observatory lies about 20 km north of the town of Parkes. Parkes Airport (PKE) is about 15 km away; the regional city of Dubbo is about 90 km to the north.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Parkes Observatory is a radio astronomy observatory, located 20 kilometres (12 mi) 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 40 years of operation.
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