The 821st Main Centre for Reconnaissance of Situation in Space () is the headquarters of the Russian military's

space surveillance Space domain awareness is the study and monitoring of satellites orbiting the Earth. It involves the detection, tracking, cataloging and identification of artificial objects, i.e. active/inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, or fragmentatio ...

network, SKKP. The centre is part of the

Russian Space Forces The Russian Space Forces () is the space force branch of the Russian Aerospace Forces. It was reestablished following the August 1, 2015 merger between the Russian Air Force and the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces, after the independent arm of s ...

and receives intelligence from a network of reporting stations which includes the Russian missile attack early warning network as well as some stations only used for space surveillance such as

Okno Okno ( meaning window) is a Russian space surveillance station located in Nurak in Tajikistan. It is run by the Russian Space Forces and is part of the Centre for Outer Space Monitoring. It is located above sea level in the Sanglok mountains, ...

and Krona. The purpose of the SKKP is to detect satellites, identify them and to discern their orbits. It maintains the Russian catalogue of space objects and provides data which could be used to support space launches, feed an

anti-satellite Anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) are space weapons designed to incapacitate or destroy satellites for strategic or tactical purposes. Although no ASAT system has been utilized in warfare, a few countries (China, India, Russia, and the United State ...

programme and provide intelligence on hostile military satellites. It is the Russian equivalent of the

United States Space Surveillance Network The United States Space Surveillance Network (SSN) detects, tracks, catalogs and identifies artificial objects orbiting Earth, e.g. active/inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, or fragmentation debris. The system is the responsibility of Uni ...

History

The centre is based in the military village of Noginsk-9 () about a kilometre to the south-west of the village of Dubrovo near

Noginsk Noginsk (), known as Bogorodsk () until 1930, is a Classification of inhabited localities in Russia, city and the administrative center of Noginsky District, Bogorodsky District in Moscow Oblast, Russia, located east of the Moscow Ring Road on ...

Moscow Oblast Moscow Oblast (, , informally known as , ) is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject of Russia (an oblast). With a population of 8,524,665 (Russian Census (2021), 2021 Census) living in an area of , it is one of the most densely populate ...

. It was previously known as TsKKP (Цккп) from meaning 'centre for space monitoring'. The idea of a space monitoring system originated in 1963 and the design was agreed upon in 1965. From the beginning it included civilian astronomical stations run by the

Soviet Academy of Sciences The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union was the highest scientific institution of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1991. It united the country's leading scientists and was subordinated directly to the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (un ...

. The system needed to detect, identify and track satellites and create a satellite catalogue. The first satellite detection system consisted of eight

Dnestr radar Dnestr radar () and Dnepr radar (), both known by the NATO reporting name Hen House, are the first generation of Soviet space surveillance and early warning radars. Six radars of this type were built on the periphery of the Soviet Union starti ...

s, four at Mishelevka in Siberia and four at Balkhash in the Kazakh SSR which provided information for the

Istrebitel Sputnikov Istrebitel Sputnikov, or IS (, ИС, meaning "destroyer of satellites"), was a Soviet Union, Soviet anti-satellite weapons programme which led to the deployment of the IS-A or I2P system during the 1970s and 1980s. IS satellites were originally ...

anti-satellite system. Construction on the centre began in 1965 and in 1968 a 5E51 computer was installed. The first part of the centre was placed on alert in 1970 and became operational in 1972, as part of the Soviet Air Defences. In 1974 plans to link up the space surveillance centre with the missile warning centre and missile defence radars were realised. There were several problems with this. One significant issue was that they used different co-ordinate systems. A drawback of linking the early warning radars to the space surveillance centre was that it caused data on thousands of routine objects to be sent to the centre, overwhelming it with data. To counter this, a programme called "Kosmos" was implemented. This programme asked the radar stations only to send information on requested objects and launches rather than everything they identified. One concern raised with "Kosmos" was that it took the radar stations two to three minutes to do this, which disrupted their tracking of ballistic missiles. It was important that the system concentrated on the

military satellite A military satellite is an artificial satellite used for a military purpose. The most common missions are intelligence gathering, navigation and military communications. The first military satellites were photographic reconnaissance missions. S ...

s of hostile countries and filtered these out from the noise of the wider space environment. The early warning radars could only cover satellites in low earth orbits. In the 1980s more US military satellites were placed in

geosynchronous orbit A geosynchronous orbit (sometimes abbreviated GSO) is an Earth-centered orbit with an orbital period that matches Earth's rotation on its axis, 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds (one sidereal day). The synchronization of rotation and orbital ...

s. This required specialised equipment, such as Krona and Okno, which could analyse satellites at that height. In the late 1980s the centre received a new building housing an

Elbrus Mount Elbrus; ; is the highest mountain in Russia and Europe. It is a dormant volcano, dormant stratovolcano rising above sea level, and is the highest volcano in Eurasia, as well as the List of mountain peaks by prominence, tenth-most promi ...

-2 computer. Later a new network based on the Elbrus-90 Microcomputer was installed. The space monitoring centre was awarded the Soviet Minister of Defence Pennant for Courage and Military Valour. In 2003 a notification system for detecting "special spacecraft" passing over the country was implemented.

Catalogue

The centre maintains the Russian catalogue of space objects, similar to that of

NORAD North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD ; , CDAAN), known until March 1981 as the North American Air Defense Command, is a combined organization of the United States and Canada that provides aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and pr ...

. The radar stations send the centre a six-dimensional

vector Vector most often refers to: * Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction * Disease vector, an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematics a ...

consisting of co-ordinates and velocities taken from the smoothing of discrete measurements. This data consists of range,

azimuth An azimuth (; from ) is the horizontal angle from a cardinal direction, most commonly north, in a local or observer-centric spherical coordinate system. Mathematically, the relative position vector from an observer ( origin) to a point ...

and

elevation angle The horizontal coordinate system is a celestial coordinate system that uses the observer's local horizon as the fundamental plane to define two angles of a spherical coordinate system: altitude and ''azimuth''. Therefore, the horizontal coordin ...

, and in addition some radars send

radial velocity The radial velocity or line-of-sight velocity of a target with respect to an observer is the rate of change of the vector displacement between the two points. It is formulated as the vector projection of the target-observer relative velocity ...

. The centre compares the measurements to the catalogue to see whether it is a known object. If not, additional data is collected to see if the signal represents a new orbit of a known object. If it is not, then a new object is catalogued.

Structure

The space surveillance network was part of the

Soviet Air Defence Forces The Soviet Air Defence Forces (; ) was the air defence branch of the Soviet Armed Forces. Formed in 1941, it continued being a service branch of the Russian Armed Forces after 1991 until it was merged into the Air Force in 1998. Unlike Western ...

(the Protivo-Vozdushnaya Oborona (PVO)) and was incorporated as part of the missile defence and space defence force. In 1998 SKKP became part of the missile and space defence organisation ''ракетно-космической обороны'' (RKO) together with missile warning network SPRN and the anti-missile forces. In 2001 these services became part of the newly founded Space Troops and were incorporated as the 3rd Independent Missile and Space Defence Army. The Main Centre for Reconnaissance of Situation in Space was formed on 1 December 2009 and since December 2011 it had been part of the Space Command of the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces, together with facilities such as the 820th Main Centre for Missile Attack Warning and 153rd Titov Main Space Testing Centre.

Notes

References

External links