A new deep space antenna opened in a tiny monastic town in Western Australia could help unlock the secrets of the universe.

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Saturday officially opened its fourth deep space antenna globally, at New Norcia, about 120 kilometres north of Perth.

Dubbed New Norcia 3 (NNO-3), it's the second antenna at the site, which is Australia's only town centred around a monastery.

The 40-metre-tall, 700-tonne piece of infrastructure was built to keep up with increasing data download demands from spacecraft exploring the solar system.

"[There are] billions of stars and galaxies we are observing and that creates huge amounts of data and that's why we need a large antenna to get the weak signal from these telescopes from far away," ESA director general Josef Aschbacher

See Full Page