For a long time after the 2003 firestorm, the road to Mount Stromlo - in the Canberra suburb of Weston Park - was closed. So closed, the "closed" sign was bolted on. When the road finally reopened, visitors flocked back to the observatory at a rate of nearly 1000 a week.

But there's not much for them to do on top of "the Hill." The fire destroyed the telescopes, and considerable focus at Mt Stromlo now surrounds the new Advanced Instrumentation Technology Centre - which is not open to the public.

Astronomy itself is done via dedicated data link to telescopes at Siding Springs in the Warrumbungle Mountains, more than 500 km to the north, although there is a powerful laser range finder in a surprisingly diminutive dome, operated by private company EOS.

So there's not much for a tourist to see, beyond the resurrected cafe and a few burnt-out-and-cleaned-up ruins. Mt Stromlo has returned to what it was before the fires: a quiet place of science, unnoticed by much of the country.

The Hill did pop up in the press late in 2011 though, thanks to Professor Brian Schmidt and his Nobel Prize. Schmidt won the prize in physics, and was part of a team that established that the rate of expansion of the universe was speeding up.

"If you'd asked me thirty years ago what I thought would be a pretty unlikely discovery of the 21st Century, I might have joked that what if it turned out the expansion of the universe was actually speeding up?" he told PopSci last year. "And now here we are."

That Mt Stromlo can still provide an environment where teams can do work worthy of a Nobel Prize is testament to the organisation's adaptability, and the way it has played the hand dealt to it over the last decade. 

Bottom line: the final frontier?

Forget natural disasters; astronomy and other space research in Australia has been under threat for years thanks to continued budget cuts from governments more concerned with the bottom line than the mysteries of the universe. Even though Mt Stromlo's projects rarely need more than $5-10 million - chickenfeed for a nation with an income of over $300 billion - government pickings remain slim indeed. 

Add to this a smaller than expected insurance payout, and you could be forgiven for thinking that everything is doom and gloom in the burnt-out husk of Mt Stromlo. But of course, things are rarely what they seem.

"We have really good academics and world-class engineers," says Mt Stromlo director Professor Harvey Butcher. "What we basically do here is remote sensing, we have sensors that detect things, primarily light." 

Even though Mt Stromlo's projects rarely exceed $5-10 million -chickenfeed for a nation with an income of over $300 billion -government pickings remain slim.

Butcher says activity on the Hill now involves projects at the Advanced Instrumentation Technology Centre - developing and building astronomical instruments, small satellites and other payloads for space.

There's also the EOS laser space ranging system. Set a little apart from the ruins and new buildings of the ANU's Mt Stromlo campus, the EOS laser is used to track orbital debris. The ultimate aim is to have a laser powerful enough to nudge debris out of the path of still-operating satellites. 

But Mt Stromlo still looks at stars, searches for planets, and probes the ultimate past via objects billions of light years distant. It just doesn't use on-site telescopes to do it.

The hills have eyes

At its most basic, a telescope is a remote-sensing device that detects photons. Once, a human eye had to press itself to a tiny lens and interpret those photons. But these days, the photons are captured by custom-built digital sensors with resolutions thousands of times higher than your compact camera. 

Since these captured photons now exist as a computer file, it's common sense to put those files on a network. Add in a bit of dedicated fibre optics, some network security, and a dash of custom software, and you can watch the view through a telescope on a distant mountain from any computer desktop in the world.

One of Mt Stromlo's newer instruments - SkyMapper - is installed more than 500 km away from the Hill. It's in the Warrumbungle Mountains in central NSW. The observatory complex at Siding Springs was once a collaboration between Australia and the UK, but the British have since pulled out. So as not to spoil an established acronym, the Anglo-Australian Observatory was renamed the Australian Astronomical Observatory in 2010. Astronomers don't live out there or drive in from Coonabarabran nightly anymore. Instead, the site is staffed by caretakers and maintenance crews.

Siding Springs is still a world-class site for astronomical observation, says Butcher. It's dark at night and has good weather. Of course, everywhere used to be dark. The Hill itself was chosen in 1911 because it was a dark, dark ridgeline out the back of Canberra, a long way from the city lights of Sydney. 

But in the last 100 years the suburbs have crept closer, so close that houses are now slated to be built on the flanks of the mountain itself. Butcher describes the site as "degraded" - not from bulldozing or the fire itself, but from light pollution.

"Siding Springs is still a key site, but there's concern that new mining exploration activity could harm its usefulness," he says. Coal seam gas exploration in particular could prove a source of light pollution that might spoil one of Australia's most important sites for observation.
So the Hill, like many space research centres, is now part of larger international projects, and shares resources with other institutions around the world. The Giant Magellan Telescope is just one example.

Reaching for the stars

Australia can only be a player in these projects if it maintains the knowledge, the scientific credibility, and the engineering expertise to be considered what Mt Stromlo's technical program manager Roger Franzen calls a "competent collaborator". 

"Astronomers are in the business of collecting data," says Franzen, "and they know that between them and that data is a big piece of engineering. And the best instruments need the best engineering."

Australia can only be a player in these projects if it maintains the knowledge, the scientific credibility, and the engineering expertise to be considered a "competent collaborator."To some extent Franzen is responsible for managing the brains trust of engineers at Mt Stromlo. As older engineers exit the program, new ones with equivalent or - ideally - next-generation levels of expertise must be encouraged to join the team.

It's not a straightforward task. For a start, you don't go to Mt Stromlo for the money. The miners and other profiteers can offer far bigger salaries - but take a mining job and you'll just be designing another kind of rock-cracker. At Mt Stromlo, you can build things no one has ever thought of before, to solve engineering problems that are literally out of this world.

"Everything we build is a prototype," says Butcher, "we sell them a vision." Franzen has an interesting perspective on the fires of 2003. Sure, it was a major setback to lose so much equipment, especially since the insurance did not cover as much of the loss as expected. And considerable valuable data was lost too. Yet, there's "a silver lining," he says.

"We lost lots of capability in the fire, but we also got the chance to rethink our capability." Franzen says the trend today in optical astronomy is toward what are classed as Extremely Large Telescopes, or ELTs. 

"In the old workshops, we couldn't do work on extremely large telescope projects. Now we're building world-class vacuum chambers with cryogenic shrouds, and we have the largest clean room in Australia."

The disaster of the fire helped ANU and Mt Stromlo "focus on the next generation" says Franzen. That means a more capable and more flexible centre on the Hill, something that can build instruments not just for terrestrial observatories, but also for space.

Rising from the ashes

The new Advanced Instrumentation Technology Centre will be the Australian space community's national hub. Its huge clean room, massive workshop, laser labs and "shaker table" (which simulates the stresses a small satellite experiences on launch) allow the Hill to take on projects from telescope elements to 250 kg satellites.

Indeed, the AITC will be involved in the building of Cubesats, the new standard for super-tiny super-cheap satellites we wrote about earlier this year.

The "dual use" of the AITC (space and planet-based) is a unique selling point for the centre, and should attract interest from commercial partners as well as the scientific community. Franzen says the centre will be available to all Australians - on a cost recovery basis, of course.

The capabilities of the centre go beyond soldering bits of high-tech together. One specially-built lab will be used to test-fire a laser powerful enough to nudge orbital debris out of the path of satellites. And a new plasma thruster - which could be the key to manned interplanetary exploration - will also be tested here. 

So that's the impressive toybox the new engineers and astronomers who go to work on the Hill can look forward to. The question of where all these new minds come from is still very much at the forefront of the organisation's thinking. Butcher says times have changed when it comes to joining the international community of astronomers.

"It used to be that having hands-on experience with an instrument was an integral part of becoming an astronomer," he says. But now, with huge data sets being shared globally, students can think up a project, retrieve existing data and begin analysis. The bit where they sit up in the freezing cold on top of a mountain at 1:30 am can be completely bypassed.

That's not to say that it SHOULD be bypassed. "I think if you want to be serious in this field, you still need that practical experience," says Butcher. "The community is bigger now, and it's easier to find an astronomy course to apply for. But if you want to work on the bleeding edge, you really need hands on."

For Franzen, the way to build a skill set for the organisation has a slightly different focus. He needs engineers, engineers who have experience and ability with: "Optics, optical systems, vacuum materials and working at cryogenic temperatures.

"What we don't have at Mt Stromlo at the moment is a lot of graduates. We just don't have the work for them to do. We need engineers who have commercial or academic experience in those areas, and can focus them on the projects we build."

Generally an engineer at Mt Stromlo has several years of commercial experience or doctorate level academic qualifications. The space industry is a good source for new talent, Franzen says.

"If you work in the space industry, you're building instruments that have to withstand vacuum, and many of our instruments have to withstand vacuum. That's because they operate at cryogenic temperatures, down to 70 kelvin [-203 celsius]. At those temperatures, if it's not in a vacuum it just turns into a big ice-ball."

In fact, says Franzen, the only thing a Mt Stromlo instrument doesn't have to withstand is the shock and trauma of a rocket launch to orbit. This also means terrestrial instruments can be heavier, and can be repaired, upgraded or adjusted. Though with many of them ultimately destined for a high-altitude desert in Chile, the idea is that they be as standalone as a satellite anyway.

Space for everyone

That Australia's space community had to go cap in hand for around $80 million to be part of a billion dollar international telescope project - the Giant Magellan Telescope - highlights for Franzen one of the key conundrums facing our space presence.

With the new workshop and world-class engineers, "we are becoming a competent collaborator in space," he says. The new Mt Stromlo has a chance to establish a technical program that will ultimately be self-sustaining. 

But we are still small players when it comes to the global stage. "The US prides itself on having the cash and the capability," Franzen says. But he questions the efficiency of the way America runs its space programs. Germany and France impress him more, with a combination of high-end tech and good business sense.

"Australia is a net user of other people's [space and orbital] technology...We've established a dependency, and that leads to vulnerability."

The conundrum arises when we consider how dependent Australia is on the space presence of other nations. Standard dinner-party arguments revolve around how we should "fix all our problems here on Earth" before investing in space - after all, isn't it indulgent to fly to Mars when children are starving?

Of course to suggest that we're not already a space-dependent - or at least orbital-dependent - civilisation is naive. 

"Australia is a net user of other people's technology," says Franzen. "We've established a dependency, and that leads to vulnerability."
He cites such obvious services as GPS navigation and weather prediction. But there's also "Earth observation" systems that range from crop monitoring to resource exploration. And of course there's telecommunications and a huge range of military applications too.

"These technologies necessarily have a priority placed on their owners. So what happens when that owner wants to exercise that priority?"

Franzen and Butcher agree we need what they call second-tier assets, our own satellites and systems, so we're not so reliant on other nations. A National Space Policy and investment in institutions like Mt Stromlo can make that happen.

Nostalgic space-heads might think of Australia as once having a "golden age" of space. Days gone by when we had the capability to launch rockets, and be a real player. But Franzen reminds us that programs such as Woomera weren't really run by Australia - they were run by Britain. And when the British pulled out, the projects were shelved. 

If there's a mood up on the Hill today, as the fire becomes part of history, is one of slightly frustrated optimism. The government continues to shave dollars off budgets, and our continuing reliance on the assets of other countries is a cause for concern, but the quality of engineering and the capability of Mt Stromlo is increasing, and the next generation of Australia's space community is finding a new sense of purpose.

So here the Hill stands, small by global standards and without the billions in backing some of its international contemporaries enjoy. Yet still, it's part of major projects with global importance. It has engineers building things that aren't built anywhere else. It's a real player on the world stage.

Not bad for a collection of hundred-year old telescopes that was almost completely burned to the ground in 2003.

This story originally appeared in the April issue of Australian Popular Science. To subscribe to the magazine, click here.