NASA: Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex

A couple of Saturday's ago we were invited to accompany some of our friends (The Wainscott's) to the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex for their little boys birthday. Their little boy turned four and the NASA center is somewhere he really enjoys going. It is only about 30-45 minutes away from our house. It was a great little birthday. They bought everyone lunch and bought our kids a little space ship to take home with them. Today, the Canberra space station stands alone as the only deep space tracking station in the southern hemisphere of the world. It is also the place that is providing all of the images for NASA's Curiosity rover, which safely landed on Mars, August 6, 2012. It takes 3 days to get to the moon and about 7 months to get all the way to Mars. I thought it was pretty cool that we could go and see something like this when there is not very many of them in the world. We even went home and watched the old 90's movie, "Contact" with Jody Foster, that night. There was a brief mention of the Australian satellite in the movie. Pretty cool, huh?

This pic of Jeremy holding Steffan is adorable! Steffan is such a CUTE baby!!! I can't hug him enough. I don't want him to get bigger. Can he be a baby forever?

You can see this picture was taken before my boys had their nice hair cuts. Their hair was sooooo looooong! Too long! It just costs so much to get their hair cut that we waited until I couldn't stand it anymore (that and because Jeremy decided to attempt cutting both boys hair himself while they were standing in the shower one day... uhhh). We don't have the luxury of having friends and family that cut hair here like in Utah. It's about $25 for each of our kids to get their hair cuts at a place like Super Cuts. Can you believe that?

ANYWAY, that had nothing to do with NASA (ha ha)...

Something else that was kind of cool is that they also had a small rock from the moon that Neil Armstrong got after he first landed on the moon in 1969 for you to view.

After we left the satellite station, we went back to have birthday cake at the Wainscott's. They are from Layton, Utah and will be moving back home in December of this year. I'm excited that we will have some Aussie friends near by when we move home.