Cheyenne Mountain – As NASA prepares to land a space shuttle Monday for the first time since 2003, military researchers near Colorado Springs are searching the skies for space debris that could slam into the Discovery or drift into its path and damage it.
From a control room 2,000 feet underground, staff with the Air Force Space Command use radar, telescopes and other instruments to track about 8,600 objects orbiting Earth – live satellites, long-dead ones, old rocket boosters and other debris.
“We can track objects in space that are the size of a softball,” said Maj. Jay Fulmer, director of operations of the First Space Control Squadron.
Deep underground, six people run Space Command around the clock, Fulmer said.
To get to the office, that crew must drive up a juniper-strewn mountain west of Colorado Springs, pass through three security checkpoints, take a bus into the granite belly of Cheyenne Mountain and walk through two vaultlike blast doors of 3- 1/2-foot-thick concrete.
Space Command dates back to the Cold War, when officials scanned the skies for enemy satellites and missiles.
Increasingly, though, it’s junk in space that poses the most imminent threat to machines and people in space, officers said.
In 1983, a fleck of paint smaller than a fingernail slammed into the windshield of the shuttle Challenger at nearly 5 miles per second, gouging a pit the size of a pea.
That object would be too small for Space Command to see, but it shows how important it is to avoid collisions with larger objects, said Dave Ward, a civilian space-protection officer with Space Command.
Today, he and his colleagues do what they call “predictive surveillance” for space-shuttle launches.
Given the expected path of the space shuttle and the known trajectories of the 8,600 objects in orbit, they make sure nothing that could harm the shuttle will pass within a few miles of the vehicle at any point.
If such a “conjunction” looks possible, Air Force officers contact the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Ward estimated that for the international space station alone, his team discovers about one or two possible conjunctions a month; but on further research, most of those turn out to be false alarms.
Officials divert the space station about once a year to avoid space debris, Ward said.
Fulmer explained: “There is a lot of stuff, but you also have a lot of space up there.”
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
