A small monastic community in Western Australia is about to be joined by new equipment also tasked with looking at the heavens, but from a scientific angle.

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The New Norcia Benedictine Community, 130 kilometres north of Perth, is Australia's only monastic town, owned and operated by Roman Catholic monks.

The town's people have been pondering the big questions of where we come from and our place in the universe for nearly 170 years – and today the European Space Agency (ESA) will switch on the world's latest tool in space exploration at its New Norcia site.

The New Norcia station has already played a crucial communications role in missions that have landed a probe on an asteroid and placed a robot on Mars.

But a new addition, to be inaugurated later today, is a satellite-tracking antenna that will enhance the speed with which it can spot rockets as they race out of the atmosphere.

Manfred Lugert, head of ESA's ground operations, told the ABC's AM program the new antenna not only moved extremely fast, but was extremely powerful.

"It has to be fast because if you have a launcher, it is quite fast - it could be an overhead pass so you have to be able to track it. Or if you didn't catch it, that's alright but you have to repoint very fast," he said.

"This is important because if you have lost a spacecraft and you think 'where can it be?', it's like you're looking for a needle in the haystack ... you don't know exactly where it is and that's why this antenna is so powerful."

The town of New Norcia, located north of Perth, is owned and operated by Roman Catholic monks. ( Supplied: The New Norcia Benedictine Community )

Mr Lugert said ESA's space missions "help us to understand the universe better".

"They either look out as telescopes into the sky looking on the stars, galaxies, exo-planets, or we're talking about spacecraft going to other planets in our solar system and exploring these planets, the moons around it," he said.

The new antennae will be put to use during upcoming explorations.

"This year we have a very exciting mission in cooperation with Russia and the US. This is exo-Mars, so we're going in two missions in 2016," Mr Legert said.

"Then we have a mission in the pipeline to go to Mercury together with Japan. This is a mission called BepiColombo - we fly together to Mercury, then we separate and we will look after Mercury and explore it out of the orbit."

ESA's tracking station in New Norcia, Western Australia, has been operating since 2002. ( Supplied: ESA )

As part of the launch of this latest addition to the New Norcia site, citizen scientists from around the world have been invited to the tracking station for a series of programs, briefings, and a guided behind-the-scenes tour of the grounds and facilities.

Andy Thomas has travelled all the way from the England.

He said the journey would be well worth it "to be able to say I've sat in the control room and we've linked up with something orbiting Mars, you know, something orbiting Venus – [what I think] will be an inspiration for those kids who have to start making career choices very early on."

"Maybe one of those kids in my daughter's class will become an astronaut one day."

The ESA hopes this engagement will share the organisation's work with the wider community.

Brisbane aerospace engineer Michaela Jeffery said she was excited "to see how it all works".

"I've sort of told people about it back home and people go 'but how? How can it, you know, how can you maintain some sort of communication with something that's travelling so far away?'," he said.

The first real test for the new antenna will be as part of a launch of the next satellite being sent to orbit Mars in March.

The inauguration event can be followed online via the official hashtag #SocialSpaceWA.