Three countries: Spain, the US (California) and Australia have their electronic eyes trained on space, each taking over from where the last one has left off, to ensure that what we are watching can be tracked 24 hours a day. For tracking space probes or vehicles leaving earth's orbit this is essential to ensure we keep them in sight at all times.

"It is a case of being in the right place -- that is approximately 120 degrees of longitude from the US and Spain, and in the Southern Hemisphere," says Dr Cooper, Chief of CSIRO Telecommunications and Industrial Physics. "It just so happened that Australia was perfectly located to play a vital role in this very important work."

"But it is not only that," says Dr Baltuck, NASA's senior representative in Australia and South East Asia. "Scientifically it has been a great match -- US scientists and Australian scientists have similar top-of-the-field competence and similar fascination with the unknown."

Dr Baltuck will address the 49th International Astronautical Federation (IAF) Congress this morning about forty years of NASA-Australian cooperation. NASA and Australia have collaborated since before the launch of the first US satellite in 1958. The most prominent part of this contribution has been in the area of tracking and communications.

There have been more than a dozen NASA tracking facilities around Australia. Over the years most of the work has been consolidated at Tidbinbilla in the Australian Capital Territory. Cooperation also led to NASA-Australian aircraft overflying a dozen countries in Oceania and South East Asia in 1996 and will again in 1999 to assess the state of the environment in those areas.

"In more recent decades NASA and Australian scientists and engineers have found common interests in technology and applications development aimed at environmental studies, and use of remote sensing," Dr Baltuck says.

"We share similar environmental problems, particularly with the size of our landmass and diversity of ecological sites. Remote sensing gives us a great tool to see what is going on."

In the future NASA and CSIRO will continue to collaborate on projects such as the Australian FEDSAT satellite, which is due to be launched in 2001.

Deep Space Network Main JPL Site

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Hughes' Sirius 3 Satellite Ready for Launch
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