Information Category | 08-03-08 05:23 GMT | Posted by Ian Chicken

Chapter 1: The Beginning

NASA joined the companies on the island when an integrated Apollo and deep-space station (DSS 72) was constructed between 1965 to 1966. The site was situated  approximately 2,250 kilometers (1,400 miles) east of South America, 1,600 miles west of Africa, and about 4,000 miles down the Air Force Eastern Test Range (ETR).

The original purpose of the station was to support the Surveyor missions, these were launched on Atlas-Centaur vehicles. These launchers would produce a direct-ascent trajectory to the Moon, rather than insertion from a parking orbit.


Translunar injection would therefore occur before the spacecraft was visible to either the Johannesburg station or the station in Spain.
Therefore NASA needed a station nearer to the launch site other than these facilities. It was needed to obtain the positional data during this phase vital to trajectory determination and midcourse corrections.

Because such a station could also support later deep-space missions and Apollo manned missions, NASA decided to build an integrated facility capable of serving both programs.

A site survey was conducted by Goddard Space Flight Centre. Space Flight Center personnel arrived in April 1964 on the Island, where an Eastern Test Range station was already established. They identified a suitable site at Devil's Ashpit, on the eastern side of the island. Volcanic peaks surrounding the site provided natural shielding against radar and other radio-frequency interference from the Eastern Test Range station and a British Broadcasting (BBC) facility at English Bay.

Deep space and Apollo missions were separately monitored by two 9-meter, azimuth-elevation mounted antennas with high angular-tracking rates. The deep-space antenna (on the right in the photo) had a nominal communications range of 60,300 kilometers (37,500 miles). This station was funded by the U.S. State Department.

The station operated through the years helping track various other boosters, rockets, and of course the space shuttle.

Cable & Wireless supplied the communications that the site needed to send back all the telemetry from the tracking missions.

They also tracked the Ariane until there was dedictaed site installed by the European Space Agency at North East Bay.

The Cable & Wireless Earth Station went to traffic on 8th April 1967 (coinciding with the operational start of NASA's Devils Ashpit site. At the end of the 1980's and with the start up again of the Shuttle Missions after the Challenger disaster, NASA decided to cut back on its operations and decided to close down its Devils Ashpit site.

The doors closed in May 1990 for the last time, with operations being taken over by satellites called T.D.R.S. (Tracking Data and Relay System).

The site is now used as an adventure centre for the Scouts on the Island and occasionally a disco.
                                                                                                        Tracking station as it was in 1999.                The antenna is to be dismantled due to safety reasons.