General Dynamics has completed construction of the receive radar array for the Space Fence ground-based orbital tracking system.
The 7,000-square-foot, 700,000-pound steel structure will be shipped to Kwajalein Atoll for integration into the Space Fence system. "The structure stands 12 meters tall and is about the size of two regulation NBA basketball courts placed side-by-side," said a General Dynamics SATCOM Technologies news release. "It is designed to withstand earthquakes, hurricane force winds and extremes in temperature and humidity while maintaining a consistent surface flatness that varies less than one millimeter from one end of the structure to the other and from side-to-side."
"The ground-based receive array is an elegant merger of a huge physical structure built with the precision of a complex scientific or medical instrument," said Mike DiBiase, a vice president of General Dynamics Mission Systems. "The SATCOM Technologies-built array has the sensitivity to locate, identify and track objects as small as a softball, hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface."
When Space Fence enters service in 2018, it will detect and track more than 100,000 objects in space.
