The Jamesburg Earth Station is located in the rural Cachagua area of Carmel Valley,

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, about southeast of

Monterey Monterey (; es, Monterrey; Ohlone: ) is a city located in Monterey County on the southern edge of Monterey Bay on the U.S. state of California's Central Coast. Founded on June 3, 1770, it functioned as the capital of Alta California under both ...

. It was originally built in 1968 to support the Apollo 11 moon landing. The 10-story high, dish, driven by a Vertex-RSI 7210 drive system, served for about 35 years as the West Coast Teleport of

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

/COMSAT's communications Satellite Network, and was the

earth station A ground station, Earth station, or Earth terminal is a terrestrial radio station designed for extraplanetary telecommunication with spacecraft (constituting part of the ground segment of the spacecraft system), or reception of radio waves fro ...

serving

Intelsat Intelsat S.A. (formerly INTEL-SAT, INTELSAT, Intelsat) is a multinational satellite services provider with corporate headquarters in Luxembourg and administrative headquarters in Tysons Corner, Virginia, United States. Originally formed as In ...

satellites parked in

geosynchronous orbit A geosynchronous orbit (sometimes abbreviated GSO) is an Earth-centered orbit with an orbital period that matches Earth's rotation on its axis, 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds (one sidereal day). The synchronization of rotation and orbital ...

over the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

. The dish played a role in capturing and distributing images of the

Apollo 11 Apollo 11 (July 16–24, 1969) was the American spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo Lunar Module ''Eagle'' on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC, an ...

moon landing and the

Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident (), were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or in Chinese the June Fourth ...

. The dish is housed in a 20,000 square foot building on a site that has been subdivided for residential building. When

fiber-optic An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means t ...

undersea communication cables became economically competitive in 2002, AT&T shut down the site and sold the entire station with its facilities intact. For a time, it was operated by 11

ham radio Amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is the use of the radio frequency spectrum for purposes of non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, private recreation, radiosport, contesting, and emergency communic ...

operators who spent five months restoring the facility. They were eventually able to bounce 20 radio signals off the moon. In 2005, a new owner, intending to use the structure as a weekend home, stripped the interior and sold the contents as scrap, although the dish itself remains. The new owner decided to sell the property after his youngest son died of cancer. In January 2012, it was put up for sale for $2,950,000. In 2013, the Jamesburg Earth Station was leased by

Lone Signal Lone Signal was a crowdfunded active SETI project designed to send List of interstellar messages, interstellar messages from Earth to a possible extraterrestrial civilization. Founded by businessman Pierre Fabre and supported by several entreprene ...

, an

active SETI Active SETI (Active Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) is the attempt to send messages to intelligent extraterrestrial life. Active SETI messages are predominantly sent in the form of radio signals. Physical messages like that of the P ...

program, to send messages from the Earth to Gliese 526, a

red dwarf ''Red Dwarf'' is a British science fiction comedy franchise created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, which primarily consists of a television sitcom that aired on BBC Two between 1988 and 1999, and on Dave since 2009, gaining a cult following. T ...

star on the

Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems The Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems (HabCat) is a catalogue of star systems which conceivably have habitable planets. The list was developed by scientists Jill Tarter and Margaret Turnbull under the auspices of Project Phoenix, a part of SET ...

Gallery

File:Jamesburg Earth Station sign.jpg, Sign at the entrance to the Jamesburg Earth Station - July 2020 File:View of Jamesburg Earth Station ATT Sign - August 2014.jpg, View of Jamesburg Earth Station ATT Sign - August 2014 File:View of Jamesburg Earth Station from Driveway Gate - August 2014.jpg, View of Jamesburg Earth Station from Driveway Gate - August 2014

Gallery

See also

References

Further reading