Picture shows Barry and Ken meeting for the first time in decades during November 2008

Photo of entrance to the station provided by Jack Watson

From Wikipedia...

"Cooby Creek Tracking Station was located 22.5 km north of Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia.

This station was built in 1966 to support NASA's Application Technology Satellite Program, and was a part of the Spacecraft Tracking and Data Acquisition Network.

A 12-metre antenna was used to receive and transmit information to satellites, which served as the forerunner to modern telecommunication satellites.

The station closed in 1970."

Ken Anderson's excellent article on Wikipedia is located here...

Cooby Creek Tracking Station

From the Internet...

The Cooby Creek station was set up as a mobile tracking station for the ATS Project. The ATS project was part of NASA's scientific investigations of Near Earth Satellites. The main objective of the project were test flights of satellites for meteorological, navigation and communication purposes and to study different types of orbits around the Earth such as geo stationary orbits. The site was constructed between May and September 1966 at a total cost of over 5 million dollars, with operating costs of one million dollars a year for the five year life span of the site.

The station was set up as a mobile tracking station, that is all equipment was on trailers as was easily disassembled to allow the site to be moved if required. The antenna on site was a 12 metre antenna which had the capacity to transmit and receive voice, high speed data, teletype and colour TV signals.

The site (approximately 15 acres) was positioned outside Toowoomba in the Darling Downs, Southern Queensland, in a secluded valley to protect the station from man made radio frequencies (such as commercial radio signals) which could effect the received data. The site employed about 100 staff to run and maintain the tracking station. The Tracking Station was shut down in 1970.

From Cooby Creek veteran...Ken Anderson

"The main equipment is the set of three semi-trailers butted together which has its corner just under the bottom edge of the 12 metre antenna. The T&C equipment was contained in the single semi to the right of the main area, the T&C antenna is to its right. The cluster of buildings to the left were offices, in front, and canteen at the back. The semi with the porch was the Teletype van."

"Here you can see the rubber strip covering the join between two of the three semis which made up the main operating area and the end of the T&C van. The transformer etc in the foreground supplied power to the main transmitter and the cryogenics. The two semis in front of the galvanized shed are the main power supply vans, each has two gas turbines driving the generators for the 120 V 60 Hz main supply."

"The guy on the scaffold is working on the SHF transmitter cabinet which contains the klystron transmitting tube."

"The cryogenic MASER and PARAMP assembly removed from the Dewar for maintenance. This was a fairly regular event as the slow wave structure, a comb-like device designed to allow maser action to take place on one of the three ruby strips used to distort and thus reduce the bandwidth of the MASER. It had to be stripped down and have the fingers of the slow structure straightened, very carefully, I might add. Easy to say but because of the time taken to bring the device to room temperature, relieve the vacuum in the Dewar with nitrogen, then open it, withdraw the assembly, then do whatever, re-assemble it, pump down the vacuum, re-install it in the centre of the 12 metre antenna, turn on the cryogenics and cool it to 4.2 Kelvins. It took about 4 days."

"This is the Operations Control console, at which the Shift Operations Controller was located. He [and it was always a he] was in continuous voice contact with Applications Technology Satellite Operations Control Centre [ATSOCC] in the USA. ATSOCC then controlled access to the ATS satellite and co-ordianted the various experiments."

"This shows Don Blackman [left] and Joe Mather at the 12 metre antenna control console."

"These racks contain the IF amps for the SHF receivers and tracking receiver plus test equipment."

"The Telemetry and Command Antenna, The transformer in the foreground fed the helium compressors for the receiver cryogenics."

"The tower in the background was the temporary microwave tower which the PMG Dept put up for the "Our World" broadcast-Cooby was the Australian terminal for that world wide TV program, the first received in Australia. The Australian contribution, which, in order to fit into the international time scale, took place about 4.30 or 5 a.m our time, showed a Melbourne tram rolling out on its first trip of the day. The program used ATS 1, a geo-synchronous satellite. Incidentally, when launched that bird had a design life of, I think, 5 years. The VHF repeater was still functioning 15 or so years later when the satellite had been moved to the east of its original position and was being used to provide VHF links to remote Inuit communities."

Original ATS satellite photos received at Cooby Creek.

"This photograph was taken by the fourth ATS satellite, which, if memory serves correctly, failed to separate from the second stage rocket. It ended up in a highly eliptical orbit with an apogee of about 6000 nautical miles. The satellite was designed to test the concept of gravity gradient stabilization, a technique which involved deploying an X shaped array of stabilization booms-they were, I vaguely remember, some 150 ft long-and were rather like very long tape measures, made of a phosphor bronze [?] formed so as to roll into a tube as they unrolled. In some photos received at Cooby you could see a couple of the booms which had buckled on deployment and were thus in the camera's field of view. The idea of the booms were that the earth's gravity would hold the satellite in a stable attitude."

The following from Barry...

"Spacecraft are deliberatly made to spin like a top when they are deposited in orbit and the booms method was an alternative experiment. My recollections are that  there were 5 of , 4 of which made a horizontal X with the bird at the centre while the 5th was a diagonal at a peculiar angle. I think there was at least one camera looking at the booms to  visually record their bending activity. As it happened they were subjected to severe forces and in some cases shear stress. The reason for the disaster were the misoperation of the explosive bolts in disconnecting the second stage rocket from the apogee motor which would finally stick the spacecraft into orbit.So there was a perfect spacecraft and apogee motor with a big tin can permanently attached. In ATS 1 there was manual override provision so that a command from Sync Control on the ground could blow the bolts if they didn't blow automatically. Everything went so perfectly that this provision was dispensed with in ATS 2 with disasterous results."

From Ken: "Note the paper tapes, the programs were loaded into the machine from those. The printer is the then very new IBM golf-ball typewriter and behind it is a plotter."

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My sincere thanks to Ken Anderson for providing an original copy of the ATS Program Summary Manual from which the following scans were made...

Click a page icon to render a larger size suitable for reading and/or saving to your own computer.

Thanks for the loan of the ATS Program Summary book Ken!