Visit the Dish today and it looks as much a relic from the 60s Space Race as it does a piece of cutting-edge signal-processing technology. That's because the Dish has been continuously upgraded over its lifespan.

The important, imutable part is the perfect parabola of the dish itself, which focuses signals from deep space onto a receiver. But since the 60s, the surface of the dish, the focus cabin (the box at the top of the tripod above the dish), the receiver itself and naturally the computers that crunch the data have all been upgraded. The telescope is now 10,000 times more sensitive than when it was first built.

In fact, according to Australian Geographic, only the Very Large Array in the US and CSIRO's Compact Array in Narribri, NSW, can out-do the Parkes Dish in terms of picking up finer detail.

We know the Dish from the film, where apparently a team of five knockabout Aussies fixed a drop-out in the video link from Neil Armstrong's moonwalk at the critical moment. In fact, there never was a drop-out in the link, and there were a lot more than five people on the team back in 1969. 

And the current custodians of the Parkes Dish are quick to point out that certainly no one has ever stood on the dish surface and played cricket!

Check out a list of the Dish's most impressive achievements over a CSIRO's science site: Parkes: Five Decades of Discovery

[Australian Geographic]