HARTEBISTHOOK (South Africa), July 23 The Russian optical-electronic complex for the operational monitoring of space debris (OEK OKM) has opened in South Africa, the correspondent reports.
As Yury Borisov, General Director of Roskosmos, noted during the opening ceremony, the explosive growth of participants in space activities and the rapid increase in the number of satellites in orbit, including multi-satellite constellations, leads to an increase in collision threats. Under these conditions, it is vital to expand the network of space monitoring stations and achieve global coverage with such facilities.
In addition, Borisov expressed the hope that cooperation between Russia and South Africa will develop dynamically, and the open complex will not be the last joint project. For this, according to Borisov, there is every reason.
Yury Roy, General Director of the Research and Production Corporation of the System of Precision Instrumentation (NPK SPP, part of the state corporation), in turn, stressed that the complex has passed the entire cycle of acceptance tests and is ready for operation. Today, according to him, a team of Russian specialists is arriving in South Africa to begin training a work brigade from the South African side, which will operate the complex.
At the end of last year, Borisov said that commissioning work at the station had been generally completed and the first observation sessions had been conducted at the facility, and its official opening was scheduled for the near future.
Stan The station was built under a contract between NPC SPP and the South African National Space Agency (SANSA). It can detect space debris at altitudes from 120 to 40 thousand kilometers, as well as determine the angular coordinates of space objects and identify them with the database.
The complex in South Africa has become the second of four specialized optical-electronic complexes being created for the Russian automated system for warning about dangerous situations in near-Earth space. The first one is installed in Brazil.
Before that, SPP built the Sazhen-TM no-request measurement system in South Africa; it is used, among other things, in the interests of the GLONASS navigation system. 6638.html» data-title='Roskosmos announced the date of launching the Glonass-K2 satellite into orbit'>