Starfire Optical Range (SOR), an institution of the US Air Force, is based at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. SOR’s mission is to “develop and demonstrate optical wavefront control technologies”, which in particular includes technologies for optical space situational awareness, i.e. optical tracking of satellites and potentially space debris. In the 1980s, SOR had been secretly pioneering adaptive optics technology before this work was declassified in 1991 and thereupon widely adopted by the astronomical community. This work is associated with the name of Bob Fugate, which is why the little hill on which the SOR telescopes are located is called Mount Fugate.
In Albuquerque, SOR operates among other instruments a telescope with 3.5-meter (11.5 feet) diameter primary mirror, which is certainly one of the largest telescopes worldwide for this non-astronomical purpose. It is protected by a retracting cylindrical enclosure that allows the telescope to operate in the open air. Using adaptive optics, the telescope can distinguish basketball-sized objects at a distance of 1,000 miles into space.
However, the Albuquerque site is a research site and actually not very well suited for any type of high-resolution space observation, because of its low altitude, the light pollution from the nearby city, and the direct neighbourhood to the airport with a lot of air traffic that requires laser shutdowns. For the actual operational mission, there is a sister site in Maui, Hawaii, the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site (AMOS), which houses a similar 3.6-meter telescope.
Currently, the SOR telescope in Albuquerque is equipped with two SodiumStar 20/2 laser systems that are polarization combined. Although this is not the most efficient way of combining two lasers, they have achieved a significant increase in guide star return flux compared to a single laser and have done some interesting experiments measuring photon recoil of sodium atoms.
Credit: Robert Johnson, SOR
