Contact Us Sitemap Home ... Space Control LINEAR History of LINEAR Lincoln Laboratory has a long history of developing electro-optical space surveillance technology for resident space object search, detection, orbit determination, and catalog maintenance of objects in the Earth's orbit. Minor planet (243) Ida is 58 kilometers long. This image was taken on August 28, 1993, by a CCD camera aboard the NASA Galileo spacecraft. Contact: Mission Data Collection Method The project uses a pair of Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) telescopes at Lincoln Laboratory's Experimental Test Site (ETS) at the White Sands Missile Range in Socorro, New Mexico. The telescopes are equipped with Laboratory-developed charge-coupled device (CCD) electro-optical detectors and collected data is processed onsite to generate observations. Observations are then sent to the main Lincoln Laboratory facility at Hanscom AFB in Lexington, Massachusetts, where they are linked from night to night, checked, and sent to the Minor Planet Center (MPC) . The MPC assigns designations to LINEAR's new discoveries of NEOs, comets, unusual objects, and main belt asteroids. | |
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