[FPSPACE] UK Space Command Centre....

[John Locker]

For UK and European  list members there is an interesting article on today's 
Sky News about the UK ops at Fylingdale.

Given access to top secret acticities the reporter is seen looking at an 
array of screens which are tracking satellites which may be spying on UK 
troops in areas of operations.
In reality it looks very much as if the unit is using NOVA for Windows , 
primed with the "Classified elset" to track known observation birds , of 
"whatever" nation .It then tells the area ops when they are under the 
footprint of an intel gathering bird.
Rather crude....but thats the way it seems.( Shades of reports from years 
ago about tracking Keyhole sats over Iraq )

Of course Fylingdales also uses the fence to monitor satellite  movements 
and detect orbit changes....but thats something regularly used , to a lesser 
scale , by many amateurs.

All in all its a bit low tech......I thought the report would come up with 
news of some new sat spying technology , not something that many of us have 
been using to a greater , or lesser extent for some years.

Perhaps there's something they didnt let us see !

The full report should appear on the News website 
http://news.sky.com/skynews/ in due course.

John

http://satcom.website.orange.co.uk/