Location: Cnr Pantowora and Thirriwirri Streets, University of Canberra, Bruce Campus
Country: Nganawal
LGA: Australian Capital Territory
Region: Southern Tablelands
Website: http://www.canberra.edu.au
Map: Below
Interning with UpCyc
By Astrid Simmons
One of my greatest fascinations is material conservation, which is defined as the practice of protecting and preserving our tangible history and heritage. I’m now studying it as a second-year Bachelor of Arts student at the University of Canberra (UC), majoring in Culture and Heritage. This passion and UC’s requirement that I complete several internships as part of my degree brought me to UpCyc, the radio telescope reactivation project I was lucky enough to intern on in 2024.
UC’s radio telescope (more properly called an antenna) was not my original choice for my first internship. I’d organised to work on an exhibition to open in early 2025. Unfortunately, that exhibition was cancelled just a week before I was due to start my internship. This was a disaster for me.
Captions
Top feature photo: UpCyc Radio Telescope, the heritage dish now being restored, or UpCycled, at the University of Canberra, Bruce campus.
Gallery photos: 1. Dr Alison Wain and intern Astrid Simmons with UpCyc, at the University of Canberra. 2. Alison Wain beneath signage from UpCyc’s past life at Canberra’s Joint Satellite Facility. 3. Alison Wain (right) and intern Astrid Simmons at the UpCyc office at the University of Canberra. Photos by Merrill Findlay, 11 October, 2024.
Luckily, the university was able to offer me several other options. The first was an internship with one of its Heritage collections, where I’d spend three months cataloguing artifacts, recording their condition and, if necessary, conserving them. The second was the radio telescope that UC staff hoped to reactivate, or ‘upcycle’. At the time, I barely knew what a radio telescope was. What I did know, however, was that it was extremely rare for an undergrad to have an opportunity to work on a big object like this. UpCyc is so named because the project focuses on upcycling the radio antenna instead of replacing it entirely and reusing as much as possible from the site. Cleverly, UpCyc can be capitalised to include our university’s initials, UC.
It was a tough decision, and I only had a few days to make it. But, in the end, it was the uniqueness of the UpCyc Project that decided me. I’m beyond glad I chose it, I’ve learnt so much I could never have learned on any other project. It has allowed me to work with great people, and it has been such fun.
Our team included my two fellow interns, Eleanor Smith, a Culture and Heritage student, like me, who was drawn to the project for very similar reasons to myself, and Moudar Omar, a Built Environment student who was interested in the project because it needed planning and management at a large scale. We were guided by our supervisor, Dr Alison Wain, a large technology conservator and lecturer at UC who is incredibly passionate about the project and the different ways the telescope can be used in the future. Our scientific adviser was Dr Duncan Campbell-Wilson, a radio astronomer with over 40 years of experience. Both Alison and Duncan brought incredible skills and passion to the project, and we learned so much from them.
But how does a radio telescope become a heritage object?
This is a valid question, especially since the discipline of radio astronomy didn’t take off until after World War II (1939-1945). Any answer to this question requires an expanded explanation of what heritage is, however.
The way I see it, heritage is how histories affect us and the world. Like your personal history, for example: how you grew up, where and when, and what happened to your family in the generations before you. All this personal history affects how you see the world and behave in it. This becomes personal heritage because all families have unique practices and traditions within the broader cultures of their communities and countries.
This sense of family history and heritage creates special objects, stories, and practices passed down to each generation. This transfer of knowledge, practices and material culture exists at all levels of society, from families and small communities to the international stage. As heritage becomes broader and applicable to more people, new issues come to light, and we need to make new decisions about management, accessibility and education. This is, in part, why we have museums and heritage registries.
To return to the UpCyc project, major developments in radio astronomy did not begin until about halfway through the 20th Century, which means we have around 80 years of scientific heritage to work with. Our telescope has been dated to 1984, the year it was installed at the Orroral Valley Tracking Station in the Australian Capital Territory. UpCyc, therefore, sits around the middle of radio astronomy’s history. Its heritage value is derived from its history as a discrete object and its contribution to the development of radio astronomy as a science and social practice.
This begs another question: how did a radio telescope end up at UC? Especially since all the electromagnetic radiation produced by modern urban life is highly disruptive to such instruments. In the early 1990s, however, when the Department of Telecommunications (DTC) needed to move the telescope from the Orroral Valley, Canberra was not nearly as developed or populous as it is today. So, when a UC professor suggested relocating it to our campus, electromagnetic radiation was not much of a problem.
Caption: The University of Canberra’s UpCyc radio telescope site is also habitat for the critically endangered Golden Sun Moth (Synemon plana ).
’This is very lucky for us,’ intern Astrid Simmons explained. ‘The ground in this area cannot be worked on because [the moth] burrows underground. When we’re working, we need to be very careful to only use the access tracks and not go off-road with any heavy machinery. So it kind of works out for the moths and the telescope!’
The UpCyc enclosure also hosts a number of bee hives, which are part of a research project looking at the impact of Climate Change and the varroa mite on bees’ survival in urban areas.
Photo by Merrill Findlay, 11 October 2024
UC’s Science Faculty used the telescope for educational purposes until 2007, when the relevant degrees were discontinued. UpCyc was then left unattended and uncared for and might have been removed but for two reasons: the upfront costs of dismantling it, and, most significantly, the realisation that the native grassland surrounding the telescope was the habitat of the critically endangered species, the Golden Sun Moth (Synemon plana). Since this moth spends most of its lifecycle underground, any disruption to the surface, including the dismantling and removal of telescope infrastructure, would threaten its survival.
You might also be asking why a radio telescope that has been abandoned for almost 20 years is of any interest today. The primary reason is that UpCyc has a high slew rate, which means that it can move from one side to the other in just 30 seconds. It can therefore be used to track fast-moving objects like satellites, and, when fully functional, will be able to reboot them when they’re unresponsive. Other possible uses include monitoring dead satellites and other space junk, and tracking and communicating with heritage objects associated with space exploration. People in UC’s Faculty of Arts and Design have also suggested that it could be used to transmit poetry into space or for projections of artworks onto the dish. Still others have noted that the site is well situated for community or school-based education programs.
But, before any of these ideas could be developed further, UpCyc needed to be stabilised and conserved. As with any heritage conservation project, our first step was to gather information about what was already known about this object and devise a conservation plan for it. Our research included site visits, a review of relevant publications, and extensive photographic documentation to serve as a baseline from which we could measure our progress. While Alison developed the project timeline and started her report on the condition of the telescope, Duncan studied UpCyc’s construction blueprints and user manuals to familiarise himself with its inner workings and determine the best way to capture the antenna to stop it from moving. Meanwhile, we three interns researched the telescope’s history and the paint used on the telescope’s surface and created a site map. We divided the work between us. Eleanor compiled a comprehensive history, Moudar created a map of the site, and I studied the paint. Indeed, I became totally enthralled with the world of paint or, more specifically, its degradation.
Captions: UpCyc radio telescope showing its condition before restoration work began. Photos supplied.
Paint is composed of three elements: pigment, a binding agent and fillers. Duncan suggested that titanium pigments might have been used in the antenna paint because their reflective properties were ideal for radio astronomy. But most older paints contained lead to make them more durable and vibrant, and our initial tests of the surface paint seemed to come back positive for lead.
Lead paint is highly toxic because, when it degrades, the lead content can be absorbed by humans and the environment. I read about its effects, and it’s some scary stuff! Lead can enter almost every organ and system in our bodies and interfere with critical functions. I was so concerned about the possible lead content that I revisited the site to check whether we had missed anything.
My inspections revealed that, despite our concerns, the paint on all the accessible surfaces of the telescope was in good condition and well-attached to the surface, except in the few spots that had been damaged by external force. Even where I found cracking or craquelure (a fancy word for many cracks), paint adhesion was still good. When I examined the small areas of exposed metal for corrosion, I found that, although there was minor corrosion, it had not spread very far. Finally, I checked the paint for chalking.
Chalking is caused by the oxidation and evaporation of the paint’s binding agents, which leaves particles of unbound pigment as a dust-like residue on the surface. In this condition, paint pigments, including the heavy metal content, can be manipulated or transferred to other surfaces. Luckily, chalking on the telescope was minimal.
These observations told me that the paint was working effectively as a protective coating for the metal and would continue to do so for the near future. I could therefore report that, although it was in good condition, its longevity could be extended with conservation treatments.
We still needed to determine whether lead was used in the paint, however. We decided X-ray fluorescence (XRF) testing would be the most appropriate for our needs. The method is non-invasive and highly accurate and can be done with portable equipment. Although UC does not have XRF gear, the Australian War Memorial does, so we sent off our samples and waited impatiently for the results. Incredibly, no lead was detected! Our earlier swab test was shown to be a false positive. To our relief, the XRF tests revealed that titanium oxide pigments had been used over the whole telescope, as Duncan had suspected from the start.
This was fabulous news! It meant I no longer had to do a risk management plan or limit access to the physical telescope.
While I was chipping away at the paint, Duncan and Alison were working out how we could capture the antenna and secure it with chemical bolts. First, we needed to determine whether the concrete slab was thick enough to hold its weight, they said. We determined its thickness using a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) device mounted on a trolley. I pushed the device along three sides of the slab and then processed our results. I found the slab to be 200mm deep at its shallowest point and 680mm at its deepest, which was great news because, for the chemical bolting plan to work, we needed a minimum depth of 180mm.
While I processed this data, Alison and Moudar mapped out what we needed to do to complete this stage of the UpCyc Project, then created a comprehensive project plan and timeline, and Eleanor prepared media releases and began the truly gruelling task of renaming and sorting more than 300 photos of the site.
After three months of effort, we now knew that the UpCyc was safe to be around but that it still needed some serious rehabilitation work. We now had the critical documentation we needed to guide our endeavours, though, and a viable plan and schedule to complete the project.
Although I’m no longer an intern with the UpCyc Project, I plan to continue my involvement as a volunteer. This project has been a great experience for me. I don’t want to let go of it as I feel there is so much for me to learn still, from large-scale project management to how conservation and use intersect and inform each other. I’m excited to see what I’ll learn next as the project develops.
Address: You’ll find UpCyc near the corner of Pantowora and Thirriwirri Streets, on the University of Canberra’s Bruce Campus, ACT.
Page created 18 February 2025. Last updated 17 September 2025.
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