Radar in eastern Arizona tracking debris in space
TUCSON, AZ (AZFamily) — About an hour and a half drive east of Tucson, nestled out in the desert, is a unique structure whose purpose is out of this world. LeoLabs, a California-based company, built a radar in eastern Arizona that monitors objects in space, specifically in the earth’s orbit.
“What these radars do is they track objects in space,” said Ed Lu the chief technology officer at LeoLabs. “There’s a lot of objects in space; satellites, pieces of debris from satellites that have either hit each other or broken up. There are tens of thousands of objects just in low earth orbit around the earth, and we track those objects.”
Leolabs works with government agencies and private companies to make sure their objects in space like satellites have enough physical space while orbiting the earth.
“It’s important to track these objects in space. There are so many of them that they sometimes hit each other. Sometimes they get close enough to each other that you have to move your spacecraft around.”
With objects being launched into the final frontier much more frequently versus decades ago, Lu said there is more debris out there, but “it’s a manageable problem.”
The Arizona location is the seventh operational radar site in the company. There are also locations in Alaska, Texas, Costa Rica, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand.
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