Join us down under at Deep Space SocialSpace!

We hope by now you’ve heard about ESA’s next SocialSpace event, the first-ever to be held at one of the Agency’s deep-space tracking stations: DSA-1, at New Norcia, Australia.

New Norcia at night

New Norcia at night Credit: Dylan O’Donnell/ESA – CC BY-SA 3.0

The event is shaping up to be an excellent opportunity for a behind-the-scenes visit to a working ground station, one that routinely communicates with missions such as Rosetta, Mars Express, Gaia and LISA Pathfinder. Participants will be briefed by ESA and Australian experts on current and future planetary missions, deep-space communications, ground station engineering and next-generation lasers-in-space technology.

We’ll also have a chance to do some star gazing and take part in the formal (well, as formal as anything gets deep in the bush!) inauguration ceremony for ESA’s new 4.5-m tracking antenna.

Apply via the main announcement in the ESA website; read the terms and conditions here and follow the hashtag #socialspacewa in Twitter for regular updates. Deadline for applications is 28 January 2016.