[2] NASA withdrew from the station in 1975, handing it over to South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), who converted it to a radio astronomy observatory.

[4] The observatory is equipped with a single 260 ton radio telescope with a main reflecting surface diameter of 26 metres.

HartRAO also runs a Space Geodesy programme using VLBI, Satellite laser ranging and the Global Positioning System.

The LLR system will use a 100 mJ, 20 Hz, 80 ps pulse length laser to range to corner cube reflector arrays on the Moon.

The XDM dish design was first used in KAT-7, a seven-dish engineering testbed and science instrument in the Meerkat National Park in Carnarvon, Northern Cape.