After the gray's, we drove the car on the trail to the next few stops. One of which was a Wallaby enclosure and the other a Koala enclosure. They were essentially huge open air cage enclosure's several acre's to ten's of kilometre's in size.

In 2003 there was a huge bush fire in Canberra and it burnt through masses of woodland, a horse stud farm, an observatory and even threatened to burn down Jim Rice's parents house. Tidbinbilla had also been scarred by this and the entire Koala enclosure had suffered fire damage. I've always liked the eucalyptus or gum tree's of California and now Australia, but I learnt that the reason they are so prevalent in Australia is because of their amazing ability to survive bush fires.

Jim explained to me that when a bush fire catches and burns the brush and foliage at ground level, as it spreads the flames obviously grow. The gum tree's oil in the leaves mean that they won't burn and just singe; until they reach approx 400c, when the leaves literally explode setting the entire trunk and tree ablaze. This results in a tree looking much like the one on the right.

However within a year or two new growth will sprout from the tree (again see the two tree's in the picture right). This amazing ability to survive bush fire's of which Australia has been born out of, means that it is by far the most common tree on the continent. We spent ages in the Koala forest looking around thousand's of tree's to no avail.

After walking around the rest of the reserves in Tidbinbilla, we were starving and drove to the Canberra deep space centre a few kilometre's down the road. The centre itself is surrounded by hill's which is intentional, in order to shield it from electromagnetic emissions, such as mobile phones, bluetooth devices and Satellite phones (which actually require you to sign a contract saying that you will not use it within 20km of the centre when you buy one in Australia). The centre is part of the Nasa space communication network, and along with Madrid and California form a complete coverage of the sky as the earth rotates.

The dish that received the Apollo 11 moon landing footage, of Neil Armstrong taking man's first steps on the moon in 1969, was here at the centre and being a massive astronomy and space buff I got overly excited by this news. The dish used to be located about 30km away at a site called honeysuckle creek, which was demolished and all equipment moved to the Canberra site some years earlier.

The main dish above is the largest directional Antenna in the southern hemisphere, and the tip is cooled to -272c or 1-2 kelvin's. This cooling cut's down the noise and interference allowing a much cleaner signal to be received which is extremely useful if the dish needs to receive from say one of the voyager probe's now approaching the edge of the heliopause. The power that the dish can emit is so huge that it would be deadly to an over flying aircraft, and when the centre needs to transmit using the dish, air traffic control at Canberra airport is called, and flights directed to other flight paths. The huge EM radiation would literally fry the electronics of over flying aircraft.

An interesting story that a friendly tech at the site's visitor centre told us, was that when the US President George W Bush visited some year's early, the dish was in use, and air force one had been instructed the fly on a specific flight path. The pilots on Mr Bush's plane decided that they knew better, and decided to fly over the valley on their approach to Canberra airport, if they had passed through the beam's focus then the aircraft would most likely have fallen out of the sky, being one of the most powerful dishes in the world. What a shame it would have been for the world if Mr Bush had died then, and so ironic that he chose to ignore an American administered complex.