The coast of Western Australia has long been prized for its sparseness and location as a prime military environment for listening and communications. Now, its pristine night skies are being searched for the detection of secret new objects in space.
Over the weekend, the Australian Department of Defence and the United States Space Force (USSF) declared they had achieved ‘Initial Operational Capability to provide enhanced space domain awareness’ by switching on a massive new ‘Space Surveillance Telescope’ (SST).
According to Defence’s announcement, the SST “will allow greater space domain awareness by providing ground-based, broad-area search, detection and tracking of faint objects in deep space.”
Put more simply, the facility can detect much smaller objects like miniature satellites orbiting the earth in an increasingly crowded and somewhat ungoverned prime real estate market above the earth.
Commander Defence Space Command Air-Vice Marshal (AVM) Cath Roberts said this milestone was an important step for the Alliance and the future of space capability in Australia.
“In an increasingly contested and congested space environment, the Space Surveillance Telescope will provide enhanced awareness of the space domain and contribute to greater Alliance cooperation,” AVM Roberts said.
But it’s the back story of the SST that makes a source of fascination for space-watchers and military technology enthusiasts alike.
The SST was built in the US and originally located in White Sands New Mexico, with plans to transfer it to Australia hatched back in 2013.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory was a key part of the move, helping out with the reassembly of the 261,850-pound beast of telescope, which relies on the best mirrors scientists can create.
“The SST is capable of imaging faint objects in geosynchronous orbit (about 22,000 miles above Earth). The SST is a unique telescope with a 3.6-meter aperture and f/1 optics. An array of 12 charge-coupled-device (CCD) sensors fill the mosaic focal surface,” the Lincoln Laboratory said in 2021.
“Each CCD has eight million pixels. The optics are fast, forming a curved real image with a radius of 5.44 meters. Each of the CCDs was thinned down and mounted to a curved mandrel aligned to match the radius of the real image. This sensor and mirror combination enables a 2×3 degree field of view.
“Additionally, the control and data processing system, designed and built by the Laboratory, receives and processes images in real-time, producing precise measurements of satellite positions. This system sifts through more than a terabyte of data during a night of observing. In addition, the SST is capable of a high search rate that yields timely information,” Lincoln Laboratory said last year.
That’s a fair amount of more detail than Defence was providing in its most recent statement, which also left finding the location of the telescope to sleuthing through the press release archives of its creators.
“On March 5, 2020, at the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt on that coast, a very sensitive telescope, transplanted from the United States to a new facility, looked into the deep darkness and achieved “first light,” a term meaning the telescope’s optics were successfully aligned with its wide-field-of-view camera to allow the telescope to capture its first images of objects in orbit,” the Lincoln Laboratory said.
Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt, sometimes known as North West Cape, is a joint US-Australian naval communications station near Exmouth in Western Australia that is supposedly the most powerful radio transmission site in the Southern Hemisphere using very low-frequency signals.
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