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(Dr Kimberley Clayfield) Space science is so important
for understanding our place in the universe
but also understanding how our earth works.
Without space technology we would have no GPS
in our cars and our phones.
We wouldn’t have satellite communications
and we wouldn’t have the earth observation data
that allows us to make, for example, accurate weather forecasts every day.
CSIRO is the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
and we’re Australia’s largest research organisation.
CSIRO owns and operates all of the radio astronomy facilities
on behalf of Australia.
These are collectively known as the Australia Telescope National Facility.
The ATNF offers astronomers a unique view of the Southern Hemisphere sky
and it’s available for use
by Australian and international astronomers worldwide.
CSIRO has a 50-year partnership with NASA,
particularly with regard to the operation of the
Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex.
(Dr Ed Kruzins) NASA’s Deep Space Network is a set of stations
around the world at Goldstone, Canberra and Madrid.
By coming together as a network, they are able to now look
at the entire solar system and chart every robotic space mission
around every planet in the solar system.
Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex has
three 34 metre antennas and one 70 metre antenna.
The 70-metre antenna is the largest antenna in the Southern Hemisphere.
This place is extremely special to the people that work here.
Their roles are so vital to make sure we carry the signals from Deep Space,
we carry them safely, we carry them with consistency
and we don’t drop a signal and they do this perfectly.
They make history every day.
The work we do here is playing a key part
in the exploration of the solar system.
The images we’re getting back from Pluto,
the images we’ll get back from the Cassini End of Mission,
the images that we get back from the Mars Rovers
tell us something about what composes the solar system,
about where earth and us sit in this big picture of the solar system.
(Dr Kimberley Clayfield) Astronomy and space science give us two viewpoints
for viewing and understanding our universe.
Looking up and out at the solar system and the universe
but also looking down at earth from space.
The data we receive from earth observation satellites
enables us to learn and manage things like weather and climate,
environmental management, emergency response
and resources management.
(Dr Alex Held) We downlink the data from a number of satellites.
Most of them are owned and operated by a number of other countries
but we have access to about 120 satellites
and about 250 sensors on these satellites.
We manage about one petabyte of satellite data
together with our colleagues from Geoscience Australia.
We’ve developed with them what we call the data cube technology
which allows us to pre-process a lot of this data
and organise it and clean it up very well
so that researchers, but also government agencies
can look at changes across the landscape
for a single part of the country in terms of agricultural production,
of flooding, or coastal change and things like that.
GEOGLAM stands for
Global Earth Observation Agricultural Monitoring System.
GEOGLAM was called for by G20 about six years ago
to use a lot more satellite data to monitor crop production worldwide.
In Australia we said that we needed also to monitor
livestock and beef production
and therefore we’ve developed GEOGLAM RAPP.
RAPP stands for Rangelands and Pasture Productivity.
We’re helping create the necessary decision-making information
and the tools to monitor how we’re managing
remaining resource and lands that provide this protein and food.
(Dr Kimberley Clayfield) The CSIRO has a very broad range of capabilities
that can potentially be applied to space activities.
They include advanced communications technologies,
sensor technologies and robotics.
(Ross Dungavell) A hexapod is literally something with six feet.
What they do is they walk more gently over the earth
than wheel or track robots do.
They’re also more agile so they can step over things,
they can duck under things
and turn themselves in circles without skidding.
Hexapods can go where no man has gone,
where no man should go
and in the case of the smaller ones where no man will fit.
If you’re on a planetary body or something similar,
a hexapod can walk over rock piles and up much, much steeper gradients
and thus it can carry its sensor payloads to places
that would otherwise be inaccessible.
SLAM is Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping.
It works similarly to how humans work out where they are
and make a map in their mind of the room they’re in for example.
Robots for exploration are only useful when they’re carrying sensors,
so cameras, laser scanners.
With our 3-D SLAM technology they know exactly where they’ve been,
so they can provide you with a map of where they walk.
They don’t rely on memory.
They keep a log of everywhere they went.
The hexapods are a massive step forward in taking instruments
to observe the universe in which we live.
(Dr Kimberley Clayfield) CSIRO aims to harness its innovative culture,
its technical capabilities, its international relationships
to support the Australian space sector
and to develop a powerful innovation pipeline
for the Australian space industry.
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