Why are they there?
What purpose could a pair of huge telescopes in 30-minutes-from-Anywhere, North Carolina serve?
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| The astute will notice the brochure matches the facility's carpet. 10/10 for coordination, NASA. |
So far, I have been reading the book, "Read You Loud and Clear: The Story of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network", which may be one of the only sources available aside from contemporary science papers. The interested can find a PDF of the book here or can read a limited (but searchable!) version off Google, or can get a kindle version off Amazon... not, mind, that I expect anyone to be particularly interested. Unless you like reading about global 26-meter telescope sites.
Rosman apparently had a sister facility--built at approximately the same time for approximately the same as-yet-unknown reasons--in Fairbanks, Alaska. The Fairbanks facility may or may not still be in use--PARI's website isn't the most user friendly, Gilmore Creek Tracking Facility leads to some HTML webpages that look to date to the early 2000's. What I can find suggests it dealt in communications? satellites, at least in part, and of the +35ยบ latitude sites, Rosman and Gilmore Creek were the most useful. For...something.
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| Orroral Valley Tracking Station in Australia, another 26-meter site |
Whatever Rosman (and/or Gilmore Creek) was used for during the bulk of Apollo, it definitely played a part in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. This is borne out in the museum, which has (in one of the dreaded glass display cases) a NASA letter thanking somebody onsite for their involvement, with fancy envelopes and stamps and the like. (There was an ASTP commemorative stamp. I might have one in my collection, can't recall.) For those who don't know, Apollo-Soyuz was a 1972 attempt to have an Apollo capsule meet a Soyuz capsule in orbit, for the astronauts and cosmonauts to prove that working together was something the USSR and USA could manage without disaster. I wasn't alive in 1972 and can't guess what the impact was, but Rosman was one of 19 facilities and/or boats involved in tracking the mission.
The section on Apollo-Soyuz also calls the involvement of Rosman (and a handful of other sites, such as Orroral, pictured above) "[indicative] of the considerable progress that was made in the early 1970s in drawing on STADAN [Satellite Tracking and Data Network] stations to assist in human spaceflight operations."
I think I've also worked out what two trailers near one of the 26 meter telescopes might have been for--they're unsafe, unused, and scheduled for demolition later this summer these days. The Goddard Space Flight Center developed something called "GRARR", or "Goddard Range and Range Rate". It referred to a system best explained through a diagram:
The instrumentation to handle the computer-work needed to make the signal delay in the sending/re-broadcast of a VHF radio signal from the facility was housed in two trailers. The ones that are being demolished due to the fact that they're unused, an eyesore, a health hazard, and frankly dangerous? Maybe. They're probably old enough. (And I thought my 9th grade english trailer had been there a while.) The system was accurate to within about 25 feet--the length of a room--which is impressive, given that the stuff it was tracking was probably going ~17,000 mph and in space.
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| GRARR System, diagram drawn by yours truly |
The initial GRARR elements were installed at the facility's construction in 1962--ok, fine, maybe they were installed in the building I was moving floor tiles in yesterday. It was designed to house relatively mobile computers; the concrete or metal floor tiles are lifted some 25 inches or so off the ground so that cables can be easily routed and re-routed under them with a minimum of tripping hazards. The system was, apparently, used for communications satellites--also supported by the museum's collection, which has models of satellites from the facility's department of defence days.
As the STADAN network grew, Rosman was apparently also selected for Goddard's DAF [Data Acquisition Facility] program, something else it shared with Gilmore Creek (who had one of those things first). The DAF was also for satellites and tracked them similarly to GRARR. Basically, one of the instruments searched an area of the sky for a signal from a satellite--Goddard told them where to look. When the telescope found the satellite, it recorded the angle from the horizon it found successful and sent that to the operations building--where I work now, 99% sure. A smaller dish near the big dish then sent a signal to the satellite asking for telemetry data, which the big dish then received and also sent to the command center. The staff recorded/digitised/logged/made note of the data and either stored it or sent it on, depending on need--in one case, apparently, stored it in a garbage bag in an outbuilding, to be discovered by current staff in the last few months.
In the picture above, you can see something very like the way buildings are arranged at PARI. The operations building, which houses PARI's current museum, lunch room, visitor center, control room, offices, computer storage, and an elevator I am under orders "never to use, ever" is connected by a tunnel to the building I am assuming is our "Power House"--which, I believe still holds power. The 85' antenna is also located similarly in relation to the operations building, which is why I am assuming that's the one involved in the DAF program. DAF also employed the most people, some ~150 men and women.
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| The DAF at Orroral Valley--which had a lot of pictures digitised. PARI has a map like this, on paper, next to a server in the intern pit. |
Continuing to read about DAF and Rosman's involvement, I find this:
NASA invested $5 million in 1962 to build the station, filling a critical need as the network modernized from Minitrack to STADAN.42 Rosman was established specifically as a full service Data Acquisition Facility and was among the first not to have the old interferometry tracking system. The site was well equipped to handle the new network mission, providing a full suite of the most up-to-date equipment for its time: telemetry reception with two 26-meter antennas that could autotrack at 1.7 and 2.29 GHz; a 3 kW command uplink system; a SATAN 16-element automatic yagi antenna array; S-band GRARR; a 1,200-square meter (13,000-square foot) operations building; a 420-square meter (4,500-square foot) power and service building housing four 200-kilovolt diesel generators, garage, and utilities; a 140-square meter (1,500-square foot) building to house the antenna hydraulic drive system; and a collimation tower with a small transmitter building located 2 kilometers (1.3 miles) west of the main antenna to serve as a boresight (beam center) for calibration and testing of the main tracking antennas. The first 26-meter system became operational in July 1962 followed by the second unit in August 1964. These were immediately used to support S-band communications, which began earlier that year with the launch of the Hughes-built Syncom 1, the world’s first geosynchronous communications satellite, on 14 February 1963.
...mystery solved?
...as solved as it'll be for now, I suppose. There's not much other mention of Rosman, which was handed off to the Department of Defence (also, presumably, for satellite tracking) in 1981. The museum suggests that satellites were also built and tested at Rosman, but...classified.
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