Looking through desert skies

Out in the New Mexico desert on the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range, about 15 minutes away from the Trinity site where the world’s first nuclear device was exploded in July of 1945, lays another first.

Detachment 1, 21st Operations Group was the first operational location in the Ground-based Electro-optical Deep Space Surveillance System. The site’s combination of three powerful telescopes, cameras and very fast computers locate, identify and track manmade objects orbiting deep space at altitudes of 3,000 – 22,000 miles.
more…