Honeysuckle Creek tracking station (35°35′1″S 148°58′36″E / 35.58361°S 148.97667°E / -35.58361; 148.97667 (Honeysuckle Creek)) was a NASA tracking station near Canberra, Australia, which played an important role in supporting Project Apollo. The station was opened in 1967 and closed in 1981.
Its most noted achievement was providing the world with the first pictures of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk on Monday, July 21, 1969. Apart from the television pictures they provided, Honeysuckle Creek and Tidbinbilla had voice and telemetry contact with the lunar and command modules. Much of this was dramatized in the 2000 Australian film The Dish.
After the conclusion of the Apollo Moon missions in 1972, Honeysuckle Creek began supporting regular Skylab passes, the Apollo scientific stations left on the Moon by astronauts, and assisting the Deep Space Network with interplanetary tracking commitments.
In 1974 at the conclusion of the Skylab program, Honeysuckle Creek joined the Deep Space Network as Deep Space Station 44. Honeysuckle Creek closed in December 1981, its 26 m antenna being relocated to the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex at nearby Tidbinbilla, and renamed Deep Space station 46, where it remained in use until late 2009.
Today the original site has been leveled, and only the concrete foundations remain. An outdoor display was added to site in 2001.
Famous quotes containing the words honeysuckle, creek, tracking and/or station:
“It was a hot afternoon and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along the street. How can I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the “two volumes of common law” that every man carried strapped to his thighs.”
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. relief program (1935-1943)
“Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it—an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Say first, of God above, or Man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of Man what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known,
‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)