The 12.8m-wide Casshorn antenna, commissioned in October 1966, has interacting parabolic and hyperbolic reflectors in a characteristic "sugar scoop" form. It claims to be the only remaining example in the world. The larger 29.8m parabolic dish antenna was commissioned in late 1969.
The "sugar scoop" antenna became operational on 29 October 1966 when Intelsat-2A, the first of the three satellites launched, gave OTC and the Australian Broadcasting Commission a brief chance to test satellite television communications as the satellite drifted to failure over the Indian Ocean. On 24 November 1966, test patterns for the first live telecasts from Australia to England were successful. The next day, a live BBC television broadcast from a studio in London featured interviews linking UK families with their British migrant relatives standing in Robinson Street, Carnarvon.
The "sugar scoop" became famous again on 21 July 1969, the day of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, relaying Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon from NASA's Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, Canberra, to Perth's TV audience via Moree earth station - the first live telecast into Western Australia.
The OTC station's eight years of communications support for the Carnarvon Tracking Station began on 4 February 1967, three weeks after Intelsat-2B was launched. A larger parabolic antenna was commissioned in late 1969 to upgrade the support for the later Apollo missions. OTC continued to provide communications support for NASA space programs until the NASA station closed early in 1975. Thereafter it tracked some NASA missions on its own account.
The station was decommissioned in April 1987, but the site is still actively involved in solar scientific research, hosting a node of the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network. In 2022 the OTC antenna was acquired by ThothX Australia, who are recommissioning it and refurbishing it into a deep space radar to provide space situational awareness on resident space objects in geostationary orbit. The new radar will extend Thothx's existing radar coverage over the Americas to the Indo-Pacific region.[3][4]
"OTC Satellite Earth Station Carnarvon (fmr)" is a registered heritage site with the Heritage Council of Western Australia.[5] It has local, national and international cultural-heritage significance.
The Carnarvon Space and Technology Museum opened in 2012.[6]
Media related to OTC Satellite Earth Station Carnarvon at Wikimedia Commons
