TIDBINBILLA, Australia -- A generation ago, it received pictures of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. It listened to Viking and Voyager, sending their valuable information home to NASA.
Now its high-tech ears, nestled in the grassy hills outside Australia's capital, are tuned in to the Mars rovers.
When Spirit landed Jan. 3, the first images it shot were transmitted here and then forwarded 7,680 miles to Mission Control in Pasadena, Calif.
NASA uses similar arrays of giant radio dishes in California and Spain. Each cluster of dish antennas in NASA's deep space network ensures the American space agency can keep in contact with its farflung spacecraft, even as the Earth spins on its axis.
"As the world turns, there's always a station in view and at that point it happened to be us," said Glen Nagle of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex.
When Spirit's twin, Opportunity, landed on Mars Jan. 24, the first signals it sent to this planet were also made through the biggest ears in the Southern Hemisphere, the 230-foot-wide antenna known as Deep Space Station 43, or DSS 43.