[FPSPACE] FW: MIT: Lincoln Laboratory upgrades Sputnik-era antenna

[LARRY KLAES]

>From: "AAS Press Officer Dr. Steve Maran" <steve.maran at aas.org>
>To: "Steve Maran" <steve.maran at aas.org>
>Subject: MIT: Lincoln Laboratory upgrades Sputnik-era antenna
>Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:10:56 -0400
>

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Contact:
Jen Hirsch,
MIT News Office
1-617-253-1682,   jfhirsch at mit.edu

MIT's Lincoln Laboratory upgrades Sputnik-era antenna
--Principal tool for maintaining the Deep Space Catalog working better than 
ever

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A mammoth MIT antenna installed in 1957 as the
first radar system to conduct space surveillance (it observed the
Sputnik satellite) is poised for many more years of key observations
thanks to a recently completed renovation.

Lincoln Laboratory's Millstone Hill Radar (MHR) antenna is one of the
world's principal tools for maintaining the Deep Space Catalog--the
listing of the more than 3000 objects circling the Earth 40,000 km
away in geosynchronous earth orbit (GEO). Together with two other
surveillance radars--ARPA Long-Range Tracking and Instrumentation
Radar (ALTAIR, in the Marshall Islands) and Globus II (in Norway), it
monitors the increasingly cluttered geosynchronous orbit to reduce the
probability of collisions. The three also monitor satellite and
spacecraft launches.

But the venerable MHR system was showing its age. The motors and motor
generators replaced in this renovation were original 1950s era
equipment. "They were past their end of life. The motors were worn
from years of use and regular rebuilds, and the inefficient motor
generators were failing frequently," says Paula Ward of Lincoln's
Control Systems Engineering group. Each failure would shut down the
antenna for a significant period of time.

Now the system, which consists of an 84-foot-diameter (25 m) reflector
supported by a tower a little over 85 feet high (26 m), is easier to
troubleshoot, and downtime can be kept to a minimum.

Jeff Dominick, the site manager of the Lincoln Space Surveillance
Complex (LSSC) that includes MHR, stresses the importance of MHR to
LSSC and how important LSSC, in turn, is to the Air Force Space
Command. "Losing MHR for any period of time would impact our ability
to track in this region," he says, pointing to the arc of GEO above
the United States that isn't covered by ALTAIR and Globus II.

As project lead of the recent upgrade, Ward was working with two
extremes--very heavy and bulky motors and gear boxes, and new software
controls running in a real-time embedded environment.

For example, installing and aligning the new motors and gear boxes was
challenging since no mechanical computer-aided-design models existed.
At the other end of the spectrum, while many upgrades had been done to
the radar system and associated computers over the years, the antenna
control system had been upgraded only twice in the last fifty years.

Prior to the upgrade, an operator needing to move the antenna for
maintenance had to turn mechanical knobs to rotate the antenna and
read meters on a panel indicating positions. Now the interface is more
intuitive and is done on a laptop. The operator simply sets the
desired positions, and clicks Run. In addition, the upgraded system
provides, for the first time, remote access to the antenna's local
displays.

Dominick concludes, "We're trying to reduce the probability of
collisions. This upgrade has significantly reduced downtime and
maintenance tasks associated with the MHR antenna control system."

By Gregory P. Hamill, MIT Lincoln Laboratory

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