Spacecraft crash a blast from the past
WHEN the Cassini spacecraft crashes into Saturn the signatures of former Geelong school students will be blasted into space.
While the Cassini spacecraft’s final mission has made international headlines, its connection to Geelong has largely been forgotten.
In 1995 hundreds of students from the now defunct South Barwon Secondary College sent a DVD of their signatures aboard the Cassini spacecraft.
Former teacher Barry Abley said the DVD with the signatures of more than 700 students was fitted into a shallow cavity between two pieces of aluminium and attached to the Cassini spacecraft.
Cassini will plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere at over 111,000km/h tomorrow at 9.54pm. Cassini has spent the past 20 years in space, including 13 years studying Saturn and its moons, and is now running out of fuel.
The school’s unique connection to Cassini began in the late 1980s when Mr Abley signed the school up for a student program through NASA. The amateur radio enthusiast organised for students to speak, via radio, to astronauts on shuttle STS 37.
From Mr Abley’s Grovedale shed students spoke to astronauts as they travelled over Western Australia.
“It was just unbelievable — we were given a time to pick up the shuttle’s frequency as it travelled over Western Australia. We had 10 minutes,” Mr Abley said.
The students received a certificate from NASA and were asked to contribute to a disk with 616,400 digitised signatures of people from nations around the world.
“While most people would’ve known about Geelong’s connection to Cassini at the time, I think (that knowledge) would now be lost,” Mr Abley said.
“They wouldn’t know any link.”