When the bearings in your car are worn you need a service but when the bearings happen to be one tonne and a metre wide, you’re going to need a bigger jack.

A massive mechanical service is underway at Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex to replace the elevation bearings underneath the 4,000-tonne main dish.

The 10-yearly service required cranes and hydraulic lifts, according to Outreach and Visitor Centre manager Glen Nagle.

“We’re looking at a structure that’s 4,000 tonnes of moving structure – four million kilograms – and that places a lot of weight on the bearings,” Glen says. “When you relieve that pressure, the sound of that release coming off the bearing echoes out through the valley.”

Shipped in from NASA, the bearings allow smooth movement of the main dish, which is the only one in the world that can communicate with the twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which were launched by NASA in 1977. Incidentally, Voyager 2 has just ticked over the 20 billion-kilometre mark from home.

While the 70-metre dish is in the garage, two smaller 34-metre dishes combined continue to maintain communications.

“There were no micro fractures in the old bearings so that’s a great testament to the excellent preventative maintenance done by our engineering teams to make sure they’re in good condition,” Glen says.

“It is effectively a 22-storey building that you have to turn on its side and spin around every day. That creates wear-and-tear on anything.”

The dish is also gaining a low-noise amplifier. Glen says the signals received from space are incredibly small and “tens of billions times weaker than the power of a watch battery”.

“You need very sensitive receivers on the antennae to pick up those signals. It helps to improve its capability to pick up these very tiny whispers from space.”

The main dish will be back online on 2 June.  

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