THE BIG DISH THAT BROUGHT SIGNAL FROM THE MOON

The Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, is one of the most elegant scientific instruments ever built. Pointed to the heavens, its giant white parabolic dish – mounted on a brick tower like a windmill – glints under clear blue skies in the early morning sunshine. The ‘dish’ sits in a natural bowl of lush farmland, an hour’s flight west of Sydney, surrounded by wooded hills.

But its idyllic setting does have a few drawbacks. “We have three of the five deadliest snakes in the world on site,” warns Parkes’ operations scientist John Sarkissian, as we walk across the grass to the entrance. “You learn to live with them – stomp your feet and speak loudly, they’ll just slink away.”

The Parkes Observatory has been in use since 1961 (Credit: Boffin Media)

The Parkes observatory began operating in 1961. Since then it has helped transform our view of the Universe. “The telescope is used to detect radio emissions from the stars,” says Sarkissian. “For millennia most of the Universe was hidden to us but, with the development of technology, new areas of the magnetic spectrum have opened up.”

The 64-metre-wide telescope has been used to map the structure of galaxies, discover pulsars – rapidly spinning dead stars, uncover black holes and track deep space missions. However, it is best known for relaying to Earth live TV pictures of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s first footsteps on the Moon on 21 July (Australian time) 1969.

• Pictures from the day 'The Dish' helped humanity watch the Moon landings

The events of the day are immortalised in the 2000 film The Dish where we see engineers battling severe weather, power failures and personality clashes to ensure the world witnesses history being made.

Away from the electronic equipment racks of the control room, most of the original technology remains  

Disappointingly, the original ‘60s control panel originally used to steer the telescope has been replaced by a computer. “We did have a console that resembled something out of Thunderbirds,” says Sarkissian, “with dials and globes, it looked really cool.”

Nevertheless, away from the electronic equipment racks of the control room, most of the original technology remains. Sarkissian checks the dish is locked pointing straight upwards towards the sky (the stowed position) before we clamber outside onto the circular walkway at the top of the supporting tower. Above us are the heavy-duty motors, greasy wheels and gears of the tilting mechanism.

A flight of stairs, two narrow ladders and a fright involving a trapped bird later and we are on an open gangway directly beneath the dish. With the ground six storeys below and the wind picking up, it feels horribly exposed.

“You can think of the dish as a glorified beach umbrella,” says Sarkissian. “Even when there’s a light wind blowing, it puts a lot of pressure on the dish surface so we have to be careful.”

The dish is enormous, around an acre in size (Credit: Boffin Media)

In summer, high winds are common in this part of Australia. In winter, when the first Moon landing was scheduled, the breeze is usually light. But not when Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface. “They prepared for every contingency,” says Sarkissian, “even hand-cranking the dish to track the Moon in case they lost power.”

“Then just minutes before the moonwalk was due to begin, a violent squall hit the telescope with winds well over the safe operating speeds,” he says. They were, at the time, the highest winds ever recorded at Parkes. “When it was fully tipped over waiting for the Moon to rise, two sharp 110 km/h (68mph) gusts hit the dish and caused it to slam back against its pinions.”

Neil ‘Fox’ Mason was at the controls. “It shook the hell out of the dish,” he tells me when we sit down later over a coffee. “There were alarm bells going off, you could hardly hear yourself.”

Houston was switching between the signals but when they switched to Parkes, the signal was so good they stayed with it after that - John Sarkissian, operations scientist  

With the circuit breakers removed from the alarms, director of the

observatory John Bolton held his nerve. “Everybody’s panicking – my instinct was to stow the dish,” recalls Mason, now in his 80s, “but I was told to carry on.”

“Just as Buzz Aldrin switched on the TV camera on the lunar module, the Moon moved into the field of view,” says Sarkissian. “The astronauts were on the Sea of Tranquillity on the Moon but it was the Ocean of Storms here.”

Parkes was one of three telescopes receiving telemetry and TV pictures from the lunar surface. “Houston was switching between the signals but when they switched to Parkes, the signal was so good they stayed with it after that,” says Sarkissian. “With a global audience of 600 million, it’s one of those few turning points in history watched by all mankind.”

John Sarkissian says he used to dream about working at the facility (Credit: Boffin Media)

But not quite all mankind. “Fox was the only man who didn’t see anything that was happening,” says engineer David Cooke, who was also in the control room that day and did get to see the live shadowy picture on a 16-inch (40cm) monitor. “Fox was told to keep watching the dials and don’t look anywhere else.”

“The pictures were coming in behind me, I could hear everyone else saying how amazing they were,” adds Mason.

“I remember one American operator who had worked on a lot of missions,” says Cooke, “and he just stood and looked at the picture and said ‘how about that’ – it was quite amazing.”

I do my best to mask my fear as I begin the climb, trying not to look down, my sweaty hands slipping on the low handrail  

“When the TV transmission was over,” says Cooke, “I walked outside and there was the Moon and I thought, wow there are men up there.” He then took a picture of the Moon. Coincidentally, at the same time, Buzz Aldrin was taking a picture of Earth from the Moon.

Mason was only able to see a recording of the landing when he watched it on the evening news. “There are still people in Parkes that don’t believe it happened,” he says, “[they claim] it was all done in Hollywood.”

Back in the present day, I am right underneath the dish and starting to get a little anxious.

To gain access to the dish, you first have to climb up a precarious walkway (Credit: Boffin Media)

“We’re just going to walk along the walkway here,” Sarkissian says, setting off towards the outer rim of the dish. “It’ll get progressively steeper – and we’re going to pop out onto the surface.” I do my best to mask my fear as I begin the climb, trying not to look down, my sweaty hands slipping on the low handrail.

And then we are in the dish and the vertigo vanishes. I am standing at the edge of a vast white bowl. The sides of the parabola get shallower as we make our way down towards the centre. Our view of the ground is lost, all we can see are the walls of the dish and, above us, three pylons rising 26m (85ft), like a giant tripod, to the white hexagonal telescope detector high above us. The dish is merely the collector of signals – the detector is the focus of the telescope.

“You can think of it like a giant radio mirror,” says Sarkissian. “The surface area here is about an acre.”

The film’s producer thought he’d get people to stand in it and do something, well that’s boring, so he made them play cricket – John Sarkissian

I feel very small. And with the blazing Sun reflected off the curved surface around me, very hot. Then I notice some unexpected markings on the low pillar at the centre of the dish: cricket stumps.

“In the film, they always say it’s a big dish but very few people have stood on the dish, so how big is big?” says Sarkissian. “The film’s producer thought he’d get people to stand in it and do something, well that’s boring, so he made them play cricket – it’s both humorous and it gives people an idea how big it is – if you can play cricket on it, it must be big.”

In the movie The Dish a fictional game of cricket was played on the dish; no such game in real life, though some stumps have been drawn on (Credit: Boffin Media)

Sadly, no-one actually played cricket on the dish in 1969. It was a sackable offence apparently. Sarkissian taped on the current stumps to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the landings.

We descend from the dish through a small circular hatch, down a series of metal ladders to eventually emerge from a door at the centre of the control room. With the equipment upgraded for a new series of observations, the dish is unlikely to be retired any time soon.

“When I was a schoolboy on the cover of my maths text book was a picture of the Parkes telescope and I used to dream about working here one day,” says Sarkissian. “You have to pinch yourself – this is a fantastic place to work, it’s a beautiful radio telescope and it generates wonder in people.”

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE FACING AI PROJECT

Artificial intelligence is everywhere and it’s here to stay. Most aspects of our lives are now touched by artificial intelligence in one way or another, from deciding what books or flights to buy online to whether our job applications are successful, whether we receive a bank loan, and even what treatment we receive for cancer.

Grand Challenges

A guide to the issues that define our age

We may have things better than ever – but we’ve also never faced such world-changing challenges. That’s why Future Now asked 50 experts – scientists, technologists, business leaders and entrepreneurs – to name what they saw as the key challenges in their area.

The range of different responses demonstrate the richness and complexity of the modern world. Inspired by these responses, over the next month we will be publishing a series of feature articles and videos that take an in-depth look at the biggest challenges we face today.

All of these things – and many more – can now be determined largely automatically by complex software systems. The enormous strides AI has made in the last few years are striking – and AI has the potential to make our lives better in many ways.

In the last couple of years, the rise of artificial intelligence has been inescapable. Vast sums of money have been thrown at AI start-ups. Many existing tech companies – including the giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft - have opened new research labs. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that software now means AI.

Artificial intelligence has proved itself in many practical tasks - from labeling photos to diagnosing disease (Credit: Getty Images)

Some predict an upheaval as big as – or bigger – than that brought by the internet. We asked a panel of technologists what this rapidly changing world brimming with brilliant machines has in store for humans. Remarkably, nearly all of their responses centre on the question of ethics.

The challenge now is to make sure everyone benefits from this technology – Peter Norvig, director of research at Google

For Peter Norvig, director of research at Google and a pioneer of machine learning, the data-driven AI technique behind so many of its recent successes, the key issue is working out how to ensure that these new systems improve society as a whole – and not just those who control it. “Artificial intelligence has proven to be quite effective at practical tasks — from labeling photos, to understanding speech and written natural language, to helping identify diseases,” he says. “The challenge now is to make sure everyone benefits from this technology.”

The big problem is that the complexity of the software often means that it is impossible to work out exactly why an AI system does what it does. With the way today’s AI works – based on a massively successful technique known as machine learning – you can’t lift the lid and take a look at the workings. So we take it on trust. The challenge then is to come up with new ways of monitoring or auditing the very many areas in which AI now plays such a big role.

For Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of internet law at Harvard Law School, there is a danger that the increasing complexity of computer systems might prevent them from getting the scrutiny they need. “I'm concerned about the reduction of human autonomy as our systems — aided by technology — become more complex and tightly coupled,” he says. “If we ‘set it and forget it’, we may rue how a system evolves – and that there is no clear place for an ethical dimension to be considered.”

Artificial intelligence will let robots do more complicated jobs, such as this shop assistant serving customers in Japan (Credit: Getty Images)

It’s a concern picked up by others on our panel. “How will we be able to certify these systems as safe?” asks Missy Cummings, director of the Human and Autonomy Lab at Duke University in North Carolina, who was one of the US Navy’s first female fighter pilots and is now a drone specialist.

AI will need oversight, but it is not yet clear how that should be done. “Presently, we have no commonly accepted approaches,” says Cummings. “And without an industry standard for testing such systems, it is difficult for these technologies to be widely implemented.”

Without an industry standard for testing AI, it is difficult for these technologies to be widely implemented – Missy Cummings, director of the Human and Autonomy Lab, Duke University

Yet in a fast-moving world, regulatory bodies often find themselves playing catch up. In many crucial areas, such as the criminal justice system and healthcare, companies are already exploring the effectiveness of using artificial intelligence to make decisions about parole or diagnose disease. But by offloading decision-making to machines, we run the risk of losing control – who’s to say that the system is making the right call in each of these cases?

Danah Boyd, principle researcher at Microsoft Research, says there are serious questions about the values that are being written into such systems – and who is ultimately responsible for them. “There is increasing desire by regulators, civil society, and social theorists to see these technologies be fair and ethical, but these concepts are fuzzy at best,” she says.

One area fraught with ethical issues is the workplace. AI will let robots do more complicated jobs and displace more human workers. For example, China’s Foxconn Technology Group, which supplies Apple and Samsung, has announced it aims to replace 60,000 factory workers with robots, and Ford’s factory in Cologne, Germany puts robots right on the floor alongside humans.

In many factories, humans already work alongside robots - some think feelings of displacement could have knock-on effects on mental health (Credit: Getty Images)

What’s more, if increasing automation has a big impact on employment it could have a knock-on effect on people’s mental health. “If you look at what gives people meaning in their lives, it’s three things: meaningful relationships, passionate interests, and meaningful work,” says Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and former healthcare adviser to Barack Obama. “Meaningful work is a very important element of someone’s identity.” He says that in regions where jobs have been lost when factories close down can face increased risk of suicide, substance abuse and depression.

The upshot is that we could see a demand for more ethicists. “Companies are going to follow their market incentives – that’s not a bad thing, but we can’t rely on them just to be ethical for the sake of it,” says Kate Darling, who specialises in law and ethics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It helps to have regulation in place. We’ve seen this in privacy, or whenever we have a new technology, and we figure out how to deal with it.”

There is increasing desire to see these technologies be fair and ethical but these concepts are fuzzy at best – Danah Boyd, Microsoft Research

Darling points out that many big-name companies, like Google, already have ethics boards in place to monitor the development and deployment of their AI. There’s an argument that it should be more common. “We don’t want to stifle innovation but it might get to the point where we might want to create some structures,” she says.

The details of who sits on Google’s ethics board and what it actually does remain scarce. But last September, Facebook, Google, and Amazon launched a consortium that aims to develop solutions to the jungle of pitfalls related to safety and privacy AI poses. And OpenAI is an organization dedicated to developing and promoting open-source AI for the good of all. “It's important that machine learning be researched openly and spread via open publications and open-source code, so we can all share in the rewards,” says Google’s Norvig.

If we are to develop industry and ethical standards and get a full understanding of what’s at stake, then creating a braintrust of ethicists, technologists and corporate leaders will be important. It’s a question of harnessing AI to make humans better at what we already do best. “Our work is less to worry about a science fiction robot takeover and more to see how technology can be used to help with human reflection and decision-making, rather than to entirely substitute for it,” says Zittrain