The U.S. Space Force selected a remote location near Lake Kickapoo in northern Texas on September 9 as the preferred site for the third Deep-space Advanced Radar Capability installation, completing the planned geographic footprint of a three-nation radar network designed to provide persistent surveillance of objects in geosynchronous orbit.<\/p>\n
DARC is a next-generation ground-based space domain awareness system being developed by the United States with Australia and the United Kingdom. The network will use widely separated radar sites to detect, track and characterize satellites and other objects at deep-space distances, including the geostationary belt approximately 35,786 kilometers above Earth.<\/p>\n
The first DARC installation is being established near Exmouth in Western Australia. The United Kingdom has identified Cawdor Barracks in Pembrokeshire, Wales, for the second site. The Texas location will provide the third node needed to distribute the network across the globe.<\/p>\n
Selecting Lake Kickapoo completes DARC\u2019s planned triad of locations, but does not by itself mean that the U.S. installation is ready for construction or operations. The preferred site must proceed through the applicable environmental, engineering, infrastructure and acquisition processes before the radar can enter service.<\/p>\n
Each site\u2019s geographic separation is central to the network\u2019s design. Earth\u2019s rotation limits how long a single ground station can observe a particular region of space, while weather and daylight can constrain optical telescopes. Three radar installations positioned in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States are intended to hand off observations between sites and maintain coverage across different longitudes.<\/p>\n
Radar also provides an important complement to optical space-surveillance systems because it can operate during daylight and through cloud cover. DARC is intended to deliver continuous, all-weather observations that help operators establish an object\u2019s orbit, detect changes in its trajectory and determine whether it is approaching another spacecraft.<\/p>\n
That capability is particularly important in geostationary orbit, which hosts military communications, missile-warning, weather and commercial broadcasting satellites. Spacecraft in the region normally appear fixed over a point on Earth, but some conduct station-keeping, repositioning or proximity operations that can be difficult to monitor continuously from a limited number of sensors.<\/p>\n
The network is therefore intended to improve warning of unusual maneuvers and provide more complete tracking data for U.S. and allied space operations. Persistent observations can help distinguish routine orbital adjustments from potentially threatening activity and support decisions when one spacecraft approaches another high-value asset.<\/p>\n
Lake Kickapoo also has a long association with U.S. space surveillance. The area previously hosted a transmitter for the former Air Force Space Surveillance System, commonly known as the original Space Fence, which detected objects crossing a line of radar coverage over the United States before operations ended in 2013. DARC represents a different generation of capability focused on sustained tracking much farther from Earth.<\/p>\n
The Texas decision fills the last geographic requirement for the global architecture. The remaining challenge is to turn the three selected locations into an integrated operational network capable of exchanging observations and maintaining a continuous picture of activity across the geostationary belt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The U.S. Space Force selected a remote location near Lake Kickapoo in northern Texas on September 9 as the preferred site for the third Deep-space Advanced Radar Capability installation, completing the planned geographic footprint of a three-nation radar network designed to provide persistent surveillance of objects in geosynchronous orbit. DARC is a next-generation ground-based space […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":89531,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10343,1812,10400,1776,257,67,350,560,1620,5841],"class_list":["post-89528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-aukus","tag-australia","tag-darc","tag-geostationary-orbit","tag-military-space","tag-radar","tag-space-domain-awareness","tag-u-s-space-force","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89532,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89528\/revisions\/89532"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}