MASPALOMAS, 1969: FIRST CONNECTION TO THE MOON

Joseph visits Maspalomas Station, Las Palmas

Today, Joseph de Ca'th Lon and his friends have visited Maspalomas Station in San Bartolomé de Tirajana, Gran Canaria.

Joseph loves Astronomy and this is a fantastic opportunity to visit one of the most important stations which had an important mission during the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969 receiving the famous Neil Amstrong's words that's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.

Maspalomas Station also belongs to Cospas-Sarsat Programme. It is a satellite-aided search and rescue initiative. It is organized as a treaty-based, nonprofit, intergovernmental, humanitarian cooperative of 45 nations and agencies. It is dedicated to detecting and locating radio beacons activated by persons, aircraft or vessels in distress, and forwarding this alert information to authorities that can take action for rescue.

Before visiting Maspalomas Station, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Grammar 28).

More information: Questions 2

Maspalomas Station is an INTA-operated, ESTRACK radio antenna ground station for communication with spacecraft located at the southern area of Gran Canaria island, on the INTA campus. It is situated on the Montaña Blanca hill and is visible from the coastal resort of Meloneras, close to Maspalomas. It was originally established in the 1960s to support NASA's nascent human spaceflight program.

From the 1950s the momentum was growing in the Space Race to develop spaceflight. A need arose for an international network of tracking stations around the globe to communicate with satellites and manned space capsules and to control their flight trajectory.

Visiting Maspalomas Station, Las Palmas

On 18 March 1960, the Spanish and US Governments signed an agreement to establish a NASA satellite ground station on Gran Canaria, the first in Spain. The location was chosen because Maspalomas is on the same latitude as Cape Canaveral, with the two locations separated only by the Atlantic Ocean.

The original Maspalomas Station was built by NASA close to the Maspalomas lighthouse in 1960. It was initially set to provide support for NASA's first human spaceflight mission, the Mercury Program, one of 14 such stations in the Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN) distributed around the globe. It came into operation on 13 September 1961 to support the Mercury-Atlas 4 test flight, and continued to take part in Mercury missions, including John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas 6 Earth orbit. Subsequently, Maspalomas participated in the ground control network for NASA's manned flight programme Project Gemini (1965-1966).

The expansion of tourism in the southern part of Grand Canaria threatened the radio quiet zone around Maspalomas station. NASA agreed with INTA and the Spanish Government to move operations to a new, more remote site several kilometres away from the original site. The new ground station retained the name of Maspalomas.

More information: Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial

Maspalomas Station and continued to provide support for international space missions, including the launch of early communications satellites by Intelsat, who named their third satellite, Intelsat II F-3, Canary Bird after the Canary Islands. Most importantly, Maspalomas Station supported a number of prominent NASA missions, including the Apollo program, the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project and the Skylab space station.

For the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, Maspalomas Station act as a receiving station for transmissions from the Apollo crew from the Moon and relayed them to Houston.

Tina Picotes visits the lighthouse of Maspalomas

Maspalomas was the first place on Earth to receive the transmission of Neil Armstrong's famous words: That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.

The station also provided the real-time backup for the MSFN station at the former Fresnedillas Station, Madrid, now the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex. In October 1969, in recognition of the role played by Maspalomas Station, the Apollo 11 crew visited Gran Canaria as part of their 38-day world tour and stayed at the newly built Oasis Hotel in Maspalomas.

In 1975, at the end of the Apollo–Soyuz mission, NASA decommissioned Maspalomas Station. It was reopened in 1979 by the Comisión Nacional de Investigación del Espacio and INTA to provide services for ESA and NASDA and for programmes such as Hispasat, Helios and the International Cospas-Sarsat Programme.

More information: NASA

Maspalomas Station hosts a 15-metre parabolic antenna with reception in S- and X-band and transmission in S-band. The site also has satellite tracking, telemetry, telecommand and radiometry facilities.

The station regularly provides support for missions for the European Space Agency (ESA) via the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, including the Cluster satellite mission, MetOp-2 and the SMART-1 Moon mission.

Maspalomas has also supported other international space projects, among them missions for the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and for the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), including the ETS-VII rendezvous mission; South Korea's Kompsat-2; and the International Satellite System For Search and Rescue, COSPAS-SARSAT.

The facility has been commissioned to support China’s forthcoming Chang'e 5 mission to retrieve samples of Moon rock, postponed to 2019.

More information: European Space Agency

When you look at the stars and the galaxy,

you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land,

but from the solar system.

Kalpana Chawla