The School was central to what was the first inter-governmental agreement between the two parts of Ireland, and the first international agreement to operate a shared observing facility in the southern hemisphere, when it entered into the Armagh-Dunsink-Harvard agreement (signed in 1947) to operate a large Schmidt telescope at the Boyden Observatory in South Africa. The School was also involved with the first Irish experiments to fly on space missions as cosmic ray experiments, in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley were flown to the moon on the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions. The School pioneered, in collaboration with the University of Hamburg, a seismic study of the North Atlantic resulting in the discovery that the Irish continental shelf extended much further out than previously thought with potentially very significant economic benefits for Ireland.