The Dish

The Dish is a 2000 Australian film that tells a somewhat fictionalized story of the Parkes Observatory's role in relaying live television of man's first steps on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. It was the top grossing film in Australia in 2000.

Plot

The radio telescope at Parkes (Parkes Observatory), New South Wales, Australia, was used by NASA throughout the Apollo program to receive signals in the Southern Hemisphere, along with the NASA Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station near Canberra.

In the days before the 19 July 1969 space mission that marked humankind's first steps on the moon, NASA was working with a group of Australian technicians who had agreed to rig up a satellite interface. That the Aussies placed the satellite dish smack bang in the middle of an Australian sheep farm in the regional town of Parkes was just one of the reasons that NASA was concerned. Based on a true story, The Dish takes a comical look at the differing cultural attitudes between Australia and the U.S. while revisiting one of the greatest events in history.

The Dish (landmark)

The Dish is a radio telescope in the Stanford foothills. The 150-foot-diameter (46 m) dish was built in 1961 by the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). The cost to construct the telescope was $4.5 million, and was funded by the United States Air Force, with the original purpose of studying the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

Later on, the Dish was used to communicate with satellites and spacecraft. With its unique bistatic range radio communications, where the transmitter and receiver are separate units, the powerful radar antenna was well-suited for communicating with spacecraft in regions where conventional radio signals may be disrupted.

At one point, the Dish transmitted signals to each of the Voyager craft that NASA dispatched into the outer reaches of the solar system. It has also been used to remotely recalibrate ailing satellites orbiting the Earth.

Today

The dish is still actively used today for academic and research purposes. It is owned by the U.S. Government and operated by SRI International. It is used for commanding and calibrating spacecraft, and for radio astronomy measurements.

The Dish (TV series)

The Dish is a satirical television series that aired on the Style Network in the United States. The show (first airing August 16, 2008), hosted by Danielle Fishel, skewers the latest in pop culture (television, movies, magazines, celebrities, etc.) in similar fashion to sister network E! Entertainment Television's series The Soup. The show also aired on International E! channels alongside The Soup. The show's final episode aired March 20, 2011, two months after the merger of NBCUniversal and Comcast was completed. The merger had brought former competitors Bravo and Oxygen under common NBCUniversal ownership with Style, nullifying much of the video material available to The Dish, as many Bravo and Oxygen programs under NBC's ownership apart from Style had been used for satirical purposes for the show.

Format

As with The Soup, the show primarily consists of Fishel providing humorous commentary on content (such as clips of television programs), arranged in themed segments. Unlike The Soup however, the show places more emphasis on fashion and celebrity culture.