investigation
How a rare cosmic phenomenon is shining a spotlight on WA’s burgeoning space industry

Just before 11.30am on Thursday, the bright autumn sun above Exmouth will vanish from the sky. Darkness will descend on the rugged landscape and Ningaloo Reef, the temperature will drop noticeably, and animals will retreat into their homes, confused by the sudden disruption to their circadian rhythms. For roughly a minute, this unnatural night will persist, before finally giving way to sunshine and normality again. That minute of darkness represents the totality of a solar eclipse, the peak of the Moon’s three-hour crossing between Earth and the Sun, which will cast a 41km-wide shadow very specifically on the Exmouth region, and on the thousands of people from around the world who have flocked there to see it. Visitors have spent serious coin to get to this precise spot at this precise time, for an event that’s unlikely to be repeated in this location for 400 years. Solar eclipses, of course, are more common than that, with one visible somewhere on Earth every 18 months or so on average, although, with ocean covering about 70 per cent of the planet’s surface, the vast majority are pretty challenging to witness. Thursday’s event is rarer still, because it’s a hybrid eclipse, in which its appearance changes as the Moon’s shadow moves across the Earth’s surface. It will go from being an annular eclipse (where the Moon appears smaller than the Sun, thus creating a “ring of fire”) to a total eclipse and back again. There are just two more hybrid eclipses expected in the next 141 years. If you can’t make it to Exmouth, never fear, Perthlings will still see the Moon obscuring 70 per cent of the Sun, weather permitting. Though a humble eclipse might seem significantly less exciting than the cataclysmic collisions of galaxies that Dr Robin Cook usually focuses on, this astrophysicist from WA’s International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research can’t hide his enthusiasm. “If you think about it,” the research associate tells STM, “there’s over 200 moons, something like 226 moons, orbiting around planets in our solar system. “But there’s only one instance where there’s a moon that’s exactly the right size and exactly the right distance from its planet so that it almost exactly covers the solar disc, and that’s our own moon. “Our moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun itself, but it also happens to just be almost 400 times closer, so that exact ratio, in both circumstances, makes it look like the Sun and the Moon are the exact same size in the sky.” The quirk that makes this week’s eclipse possible extends beyond size and distance to time as well. “100,000 years from now that won’t be the case,” Dr Cook explains. “The moon is shifting in its orbit further away from us, so we are just sitting in this precise location in space, at this precise location in time, whereby the two objects are exactly aligned with one another . . . and it’s only just the case that it casts a small shadow on a very particular part on the Earth, and that place just happens to be Exmouth.” It’s the latest instalment of a cosmic phenomenon that has been a source of wonder (and terror) for millennia. In ancient China, for example, a solar eclipse was said to portend trouble for the emperor. The Chinese believed the events were caused by a celestial dragon devouring the Sun, and it was the custom to take to the streets banging on pots and drums to frighten it away. In 2159 BCE, it was just this sort of din that first alerted Imperial Emperor Chung K’ang to an unfolding eclipse, according to a passage in the Shu-ching, one of the so-called Five Classics of Confucianism. The emperor was likely relieved that his subjects made enough noise to successfully scare the dragon away, but it didn’t stop K’ang taking the heads of the palace’s resident astronomers, Hsi and Ho, for failing to predict the event. A colourful tale to be sure, but it suggests Chinese astronomers have been predicting the timing of eclipses for more than 4000 years. Mark McGowan has enjoyed emperor status at times, but the WA Premier can be assured modern astronomy is more reliable than Hsi and Ho when it comes to predicting eclipses, whether they be solar or lunar (when the Earth’s shadow obscures the Moon). And it’s a good thing, too, because his Government has treated the Ningaloo Eclipse (trademark pending) as another example of big-event tourism, on a scale that’s arguably even more impressive than luring Manchester United to Optus Stadium. As such, the State Government has spent years preparing for this moment, committing $22 million to bolstering local roads, infrastructure and telecommunications, to ensure those aforementioned visitors are well catered for, and that they leave singing the praises of WA as a tourist destination. “What we’re hoping to do out of this is sort of potentially launch a whole new mode of tourism in Western Australia which is sometimes called astro tourism or dark sky tourism,” Tourism Minister Roger Cook tells STM. “There’s this huge audience in the world that just really loves to stargaze and to appreciate all things science and space, and this is a great opportunity for us to present our best face for that particular audience.” Long after the last eclipse-chaser has left our little corner of the world, the Government has high hopes that people will continue to look to the heavens, as WA prepares to play a prominent role in the space race. In the past, this race may have been seen as a sprint, with countries competing to be the first to orbit the Earth or set foot on the Moon. Now it’s more like a marathon, with multiple finish lines and billions of dollars in prize money. Since 1961, the State has served as a key space telecommunications outpost for NASA, including on the Apollo Moon mission, and our geographic location combined with vast expanses of empty real estate have seen a proliferation of space infrastructure in recent years. More than 100 international and Australian companies in the sector have operations in WA, while the next generation is being groomed at Curtin University’s Space Science and Technology Centre and the University of WA’s International Space Centre. Those tertiary institutions and the State Government are founding members of the Perth-based consortium Australian Remote Operations for Space and Earth, which is a fine example of just how bright the future looks. Last month AROSE was selected to build, test and operate early-stage prototypes of a lunar rover that will collect soil on the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis mission. As AROSE chief executive Leanne Cunnold sees it, this extraterrestrial mission has its origins in the red dirt of the Pilbara. “Australia’s world-leading remote operations expertise, driven out of the resources sector, has direct application to the foundational services central to establishing a sustainable human presence on the Moon, and eventually supporting exploration of Mars,” Cunnold says. “AROSE’s successful Trailblazer Stage 1 bid is a testament to Western Australia’s diverse space capabilities, world-leading expertise in robotics and remote operations, and our State’s growing role in advancing Australian sovereign space capabilities and critical support of international space missions.” The capabilities Cunnold hints at have grown exponentially in recent years thanks to an influx of former NASA staff, who, in choosing WA, have boldly gone where few players in the space industry have gone before, to paraphrase one James T. Kirk. With 20 years of high-level NASA experience under her belt, Dawn McIntosh’s arrival in Perth in 2021 was a coup for our nascent space industry and a big win for the Australian division of Fugro, a leading multinational geo-data company and founding member of AROSE. In November last year the company, which hired McIntosh as its space systems director, launched the Space Automation, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Control Complex, based right here in Perth. “This facility is very much like a NASA mission control facility, with the unique differentiator that this space robotics operations capability is born out of the approaches we take in the Western Australian resources sector,” McIntosh explains. “WA’s resource sector leads the world in minimally invasive mining, so, as we move off-planet, it is important to take WA’s lessons learned and apply those best practices to the Moon and other planetary bodies.” While Cook is hopeful the eclipse will generate long-term benefits for the State, the Deputy Premier, who also oversees the key portfolios of State Development, Jobs and Trade, and Science, is even more bullish about a return on investment in the space industry. “If you look at just the Artemis program that NASA is running at the moment . . . in terms of the current industry levels of funding, it is literally in the trillions of US dollars that they have been looking to invest over the coming five to 10 years,” Cook says. “If Western Australia enjoys even just a small part of that, whether it’s through . . . logistics and ground station activity, or if it is the actual running of a lunar rover on the moon, there are huge economic opportunities for WA just coming out of that alone.” Minister Cook isn’t alone in thinking that. “The US has been partnering with Western Australia for decades on space,” US Consul General Siriana Nair agrees. The diplomat pointed to a visit in February by NASA deputy administrator and former astronaut Pam Melroy as evidence of how deeply America values WA’s role in the sector moving forward. “Space is vital to the prosperity and safety of both our countries and our people — we rely on space many times each day for navigation, communications and much more,” the Consul General says. “Advances in the space sector will improve people’s daily lives, create more jobs and help better protect the planet . . . and what better place to see the future than Western Australia.” WA is also one of the best places on the planet to see the past, thanks to the construction of the grandest scientific instrument ever assembled in Australia, the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, being built in the Murchison region. The traditional owners of the land on which the SKA will sit, the Wajarri Yamaji people, have been looking to the stars for tens of thousands of years. There’s a nice symmetry to the idea that the world’s oldest continuous culture will help us see the oldest light in the universe. The CSIRO, with funding from the State and Federal governments, is managing the site on behalf of an international consortium of 16 countries, and SKA-Low telescope director Dr Sarah Pearce says the project will put Australia and WA “on the map” as a global leader in radio astronomy. “It will bring jobs and employment opportunities into WA, and specifically into the Murchison region, where the telescope will be built, and in Geraldton, where our engineering operations centre is located,” Dr Pearce says. She’s quick to point out WA already has a strong reputation in the field, thanks to a number of groundbreaking discoveries already made at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory where the SKA will eventually operate. Dr Douglas Bock, CSIRO’s director of space and astronomy, says the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope at the site played a pivotal role in the discovery of fast radio bursts. “Fast radio bursts have now become a new field of study that involves telescopes all over the world and in space, such as the Hubble Space Telescope,” Dr Bock says. Such breakthroughs have seen WA become a destination for some of the brightest minds in astronomy, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Science Minister. “When I first got involved in politics, there perhaps wasn’t a single astrophysicist in Western Australia,” Cook recalls. “Today, we have I think the third-biggest hub of astrophysicists in the world.”

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How a rare cosmic phenomenon is shining a spotlight on WA’s burgeoning space industry

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investigation
How a rare cosmic phenomenon is shining a spotlight on WA’s burgeoning space industry