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Mike Dinn in front of a 7 metre diameter lunar globe at Questacon science centre in Canberra, 23rd November 2018.
Photo by Colin Mackellar. |
Mike Dinn was born and educated in England. After
graduating in Electrical Engineering (London) in 1955 he worked in British industry
mainly on aircraft electronics and electrics.
In 1960 he moved to Australia,
and was responsible for aircraft flight testing Instrumentation with the Royal
Australian Air Force.
Mike moved to the Canberra
Deep Space Tracking Station (Tidbinbilla part of NASA/JPLs
Deep Space Network) in 1966 as Deputy Station Director in charge of Operations,
his first mission being Surveyor.
In 1967 he took a similar
position at Honeysuckle Creek, one of NASAs three main communications
facilities for the Apollo program, and was actively involved in manned missions Apollos 7 to
13.
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Mike Dinn at Kennedy Space Center in 1967. |
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Mike Dinn, Deputy Director of Honeysuckle Creek, May 1968.
Large, larger.
Photo by Hamish Lindsay, scan by Colin Mackellar. |
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Many who supported Apollo 11 received one of these medallions in a commemorative folder. Here is Mike’s.
Photo by Colin Mackellar. |
He returned to the DSN station
during the building of the new 210 ft dish at Tidbinbilla, and spent a year
at JPL Pasadena (1972). This antenna supported Apollo 17 as its first task.
After a period in Australias
Department of Defence he returned to the Deep Space Station in 1983, becoming
Director in 1988. NASAs main missions during this period were Voyager,
Magellan and Galileo, but the facility also supported Shuttle until the TDRSS
spacecraft were in place.
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Mike received the NASA Public Service Award for his management of the PCTA – the Parkes Canberra Telemetry Array for the Voyager 2 Uranus Encounter in 1986.
Photo by Colin Mackellar. |
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Here is his NASA Public Service Medal.
Photo by Colin Mackellar. |
Mike retired in 1994
on Apollo 11s 25th anniversary, having just succeeded in obtaining an Apollo
11 lunar rock for display, presented by John Young.
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John Young presents Mike with a model of DSS-43 as a retirement memento on behalf of JPL – at the Apollo 11 25th anniversary function at The Hellenic Club in Canberra, July 1994.
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And Mike
was presented with this photo of Australia by John Young … |
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… along with this signed photo. |
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Mike with the Moon rock presented by John Young. |
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John Young and Mike Dinn with the lunar sample in the Visitors Centre at CDSCC Tidbinbilla, July 1994. |
Mike considers the highlight
of his career as being Apollo 11 operations (and in particular the TV of the
first lunar step to the world coming through Honeysuckle), closely followed
by being at Houston during Apollo 17 and sending some commands from Ed Fendells
INCO console on Gene Kranzs shift, and also Apollo 8 where Honeysuckle
Creek first came into its own.
Mike was awarded two NASA
Public Service Medals in 1986 and 1995.
A ‘career highlight’ occurs during the Apollo 11 EVA:
Mike Dinn confirms to Network (Ernie Randall) in Houston that the President is Uplinking. i.e., President Nixon’s voice is going up to the Command Service Module through HSKX, while simultaneously going to the Lunar Module through Goldstone.
Listen at this link – 16 second / 600kb mp3 file courtesy Ben Feist. |
Here is an outline of Mike's spacetracking work:
Feb 1966 Tidbinbilla, Deputy Station Director to Bob Leslie. Operations Supervisor. Missions – Pioneer 6, Surveyor 1,2,3,4,5. Other Pioneers.
Aug 1967 Honeysuckle, Deputy Station Director to Tom Reid. Responsible for Operations. Apollo 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13. (Don Gray Director last mission).
June 1970 Tidbinbilla, Deputy Director to Tom Reid. Station Director, DSS 42. (Frank Northey was Station Director DSS43, abuilding). Operations, engineering, integrating 43.
Dec 1971 to Feb 1973, JPL. System design DSS43. Organise DSS43 support of Apollo 17 with GSFC and Houston.
1973 to 1983, Dept Defence. Aircraft projects, industry participation.
1983 Tidbinbilla, Deputy Director to Tom Reid. Implementation of DSS46. Parkes support of Voyager Uranus. Shuttle missions.
1989 to 1994 Tidbinbilla, Director. Magellan, Voyager Neptune, Galileo. |
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Mike Dinn and his brother Terry and children Adrian and Cathy at Honeysuckle Creek in 1980. Terry and his family were newly arrived from the UK and Terry was working as a security guard at the station. |
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In 2019, Mike’s granddaughter Therese was part of a team which assessed the Parkes Radio Telescope for National Heritage Listing.
John Sarkissian took this fun photo of her ‘playing cricket’ on the Parkes dish. |
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John Sarkissian took this photo of the National Heritage team on the Parkes dish. |
Favourite
Mission
(From an online discussion.)
I had already voted
for [Apollo] 8 for the reasons John cites. We worked
together on the mission. In retrospect Im amazed at the confidence we
(the whole project) had, but everything possible had been done to prepare, including
contingency planning.
Our HSK in-house sim capability came about as a result of a visit I had to Houston, when I sat in on several
MOCR simulations with Network. I realised that we at the Station
didnt have the same depth of contingency capability as the Flight Control
team.
So when I got back to HSK,
and with Tom Reids support, we decided to build an in-house capability
based around some excess consoles from the tracking ship CSQ (which I selected
at Fremantle), and various other pieces of equipment to assemble the many Apollo
spectrums. I even approached Howard Kyle at Houston at one point to see if we
could lay our hands on an excess/spare/prototype PSP (pre-signal processor)
which mixed the various signals in the CSM – but with no success.
The only thing we couldnt
simulate was American accents for astronaut and CAPCOM voice, so we had a number
of laconic Australian voices pretending to land and step on the lunar surface.
Messed it up a bit. The simulations were great for building confidence.
I used to say that the Apollo
projects used only about 5 percent of support capability for a nominal mission,
but we got to 95 per cent on Thirteen. It was THE mission when the receiver operators
earned their money sorting out the LM signal from the SIVB on the same
frequency. We had four receivers at HSK, four at Tidbinbilla and two at Parkes
all trying.
And as John said the later
missions added a great deal of complexity for us – the Lunar Rover was a complete
spacecraft itself from a comms point of view.
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Don Gray and Mike Dinn (circled) are among this gathering of MSFN StaDirs and Assistand StaDirs at Houston in 1968.
Between them is Australian Jack Dowling, StaDir at MILA.
Preserved and scanned by Mike Dinn. |
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Ops Console in preparation for Apollo 11. (June 1969)
From left to right: John Saxon (standing), Ken Lee, Tom Reid (Station Director), Mike
Dinn (standing), and Ian Grant.
Large, Larger. Scan: Colin Mackellar. |
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Mike was given this wooden spoon at Honeysuckle Creek. |
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Mike Dinn ABC Radio interview.
Mike was interviewed by Richard Fidler on his Conversations programme on ABC Radio across Australia on Wednesday 12 November 2014.
Listen here.
Photo: Mike at Tidbinbilla, 19 March 2014. |
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A Certificate of Appreciation for support of the Magellan Program to create high resolution radar maps of Venus. |
Read about origin
of the HSK designation for Honeysuckle Creek