20th Space Control Squadron - History

History

The personnel of the 20th SPCS operate the Air Force Space Surveillance System and maintain the AN/FPS-85 radar, the Air Force's only phased-array radar dedicated to tracking earth-orbiting objects. The AN/FPS-85 radar can track approximately 90 percent of all manmade objects in earth orbit. The radar can track near-earth objects the size of a softball moving at 300 miles (500 km) and deep space objects the size of a basketball moving at 22,300 nautical miles (41,300 km) above earth. Located at Site C-6 on Eglin, the squadron is a geographically separated unit of the 21st Space Wing and the only Air Force Space Command unit on Eglin.

Read more about this topic:  20th Space Control Squadron

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.
    Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)

    What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

    When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)