There is the rusted stern of a ship lying in what, hundreds of years ago, was still the bed of a lake, the same lake where Emperor Claudius, in 52 AD, even organised a spectacular naumachia to inaugurate the canal for its drainage. The ship placed there, however, is not such an ancient archaeological relic. It is a piece of the Elettra, the laboratory vessel from which Guglielmo Marconi, moored in Genoa, sent the radio signal that lit up the lights of the city of Sydney in 1930.
The fourth episode of Space Panorama takes you into what, seen from a satellite, looks a bit like the navel of Italy: the Fucino plain in Abruzzo, which opens up before Avezzano, where the most important Italian teleport is located - a centre for communication with satellites and with probes travelling through deep space. The Elettra is placed here as a glorious relic; it forms the vertex of an ideal triangle with the antenna that brought Italian television the images of the first Moon landing on 20 July 1969, and with the one that, for the first time in Italy, received via radio the signal of a still very young Internet.
Three examples among a forest of large and small dishes stretched toward the sky:“This is the largest teleport in the world for civil use today, with its 170 antennas, and it manages an innumerable series of services,”says Gianni Riccobono, Director of the Fucino Space Centre.
Telespazio was essentially born here, where in 1963 the first signal from the American satellite Telstar was received, and it has grown to become a protagonist of moments that have marked history and brought it into Italian homes. Such as the first live global TV broadcast, Our World, in 1967, and the “giant leap for mankind” of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
“For a long time, satellites were used mainly for communications. In 1976, an antenna was installed here that received data from the Landsat 1 satellite, and this opened up an entire field of applications that for us now are absolutely common - Earth observation for agriculture, emergency management, and intelligence,”recalls Riccobono.
For the first time, right from here, Pope John Paul II gave a blessing broadcast worldwide to 40 countries. Now, from these gigantic antennas - the largest of which measures 32 metres in diameter - travel the images of broadcasters arriving from every part of the world. They take the path of the sky, bounce from the antennas in orbit, and are collected by the great terrestrial “ears”, then redistributed toward the domestic dishes pointing skyward from almost every rooftop.
“The teleport is like a port - it receives, processes, and retransmits information, which is therefore like a traded good,” explains Ponziano Tarquini, Infrastructures Engineer at Telespazio, while behind him the video feeds flow from half a dozen different places around the world.
“Examples of services we manage are all sporting events such as the Football World Cup, the Olympics, cycling races, as well as events of major socio-political importance - everything that has national and international relevance.”
Telespazio was born at the dawn of the space age and has grown in parallel with the increasingly important needs of the sector and of society. It is not enough to know how to build and launch satellites - one must know how to manage and “listen” to them, collect their signal, process it, and know where to direct it. Just like the raw material of a mine. Over the years, new centres have been established in Italy - in 1977 at Lario, north of Lake Como, near Milan and the major television operators; in 1986 the one in Scanzano, near Palermo, the southernmost centre in Europe, covering all of North Africa and the Middle East. And then, progressively, in the rest of the world: three centres in Brazil, one in Argentina, and one in Romania.
On another monitor flow the images of the International Space Station - the signal that, from space, is transmitted to Houston and from there to Italy, where Telespazio retransmits it to the Italian Space Agency. Fucino is one of the nerve centres of a critical infrastructure: from here pass and are distributed the navigation, positioning and timing signals of the European satellite system Galileo. It also provides connection and communication, internet, to maritime fleets across the seven seas. Even the MOSE system in Venice is managed through a signal handled at Fucino, which rises toward a satellite tens of thousands of kilometres away.
“In terrestrial connections there are many connection points, with a higher risk of interruption,” explains Berardo Partemi, GDDN Service Operation Manager at Telespazio.
“In the case of a satellite connection, we have the remote element, the satellite, and the central element. This allows for greater robustness because there are only three elements involved.”
Marconi understood this already a century ago. That is why a piece of the Elettra has been brought to the Fucino Space Centre.
“Marconi is the father of radio and electromagnetic propagation. He was the first to carry out experiments that made it possible to transform a theory into practice, to use electromagnetism to connect and transmit signals and voice. And, all in all, what we do here at Fucino originates precisely from those early experiments of his.”