A longtime Dahlgren tenant command has been realigned to help monitor a growing constellation of space junk.
The Space-Based Space Surveillance satellite, expected to launch soon, will add a new dimension to the effort to track more than 20,000 manmade objects--including satellites and rocket debris--orbiting the Earth.
The 20th Space Control Squadron, Detachment 1 at the Naval Support Facility Dahlgren in King George County, operates a space "fence" that keeps track of objects as small as a basketball, using ground-based radars. It scans for objects more than 17,000 miles from Earth.
In March 2009, an Iridium telecommunications satellite was destroyed in a collision with a dead Russian satellite. About 1,000 active satellites, the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station are considered vulnerable to such collisions.
Shortly after the dawn of the Space Age, with the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957, the Navy began its space monitoring at the former Naval Ordnance Laboratory at Dahlgren.
Later, it evolved into the Naval Space Surveillance System. Then in 2004, the the 20th Space Control Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida took over, forming the detachment here.
In April, one component of the Dahlgren detachment was re-activated as the Distributed Space Command and Control-Dahlgren, and assigned to the 614th Air and Space Operations Center, Detachment 1 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The new satellite will complement the mission of the Air and Space Operations Center, an Air Force spokesman said this week.
"It adds new capabilities to the current ground-based Space Surveillance Network" used to track high-priority satellites and space objects, and to detect when satellites maneuver or re-enter the atmosphere.
The surveillance satellite will track objects in deep space and can track near-Earth objects as needed, he said.
Also, it won't face the weather and daylight limitations of optical sensors on the ground.
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