Kagnew has a special place in my heart. It is in its vicinity where I grew
up during my early teens. I have had many American friends who used to buy
sling shuts from me. Some of them are my life time friends in the States.
The books that they gave me in an exchange of sling shuts helped me to
improve my English. For more information, you can visit the Kagnew web site
where my article is posted. It explains the fond memory of the golden
sixties. For all of these, I had no any ideas of Kagnew then. However, my
present fascination with space exploration with China and India as nouveaux
competitors induced me to reflect on Kangew, the biggest, and if not the most
mysterious army base in the world. Following is what I found during the
course of my computer search.
A network of stations was set up, but the main station was placed at
Asmara - in then Ethiopia - (see map on the left) at almost the same longitude
as the main Soviet ground station in the Crimea. It had an 85 ft antenna
(operational in April 1965) and a 150 ft dish with lower surface accuracy
(operational in 1964). A search on the WWW reveals that there was a US Army
Security Agency station at Asmara, nicknamed "Kagnew Station", starting in May
1950. Presumably the deep space monitoring station was co-located with the
army facility.
The first spacecraft that the Asmara station (read the _U.S. Department of
Defense news release_
(
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/Deepspac/Stoneh.htm) about its creation) tracked was Luna 5 launched in the direction of
the moon in May 1965. Asmara picked up "both of the two spacecraft signals",
measured Doppler shift and could not find any evidence of retrorocket
firing. Asmara also tracked Luna 6, but missed Zond 3 because it did not obtain
a "fix" during injection, with which to determine the trajectory further
away from the earth. Asmara tracked Luna 7 and confirmed that no retrofire
occurred.
The Venus 2 and 3 flights were not tracked into deep space by Asmara, and
the other stations missed the injection of Venus 2 because it used 51.6 deg
inclination for the parking orbit instead of 65 degrees.
Luna 8 was observed by Asmara to decelerate during descent, but not enough
for a soft landing. During the flight of Luna 9, Asmara, Jodrell Bank,
Naval Research Laboratory and The Royal Radar Establishment were all
listening. The US sensors also picked up the pictures and produced printouts of
them, just like those of Jodrell Bank, but stamped SECRET!
The Asmara station, code-named STONEHOUSE, operated from 1965 to 1975. It
had to be shut down because of political unrest in Ethiopia. At the time
(during the flight of Venera 9 and 10) the uplink monitoring station was lost
also. The Asmara site had picked up telemetry on 183.6, 922-928 MHz and 3.7
GHz (4x the 900 MHz signal) from Soviet deep space probes, but failed
initially to detect the telemetry on "5 cm". The story in _(2)_
(
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/Deepspac/Deepspac.htm#missing) ends here, but it
seems that finally this frequency must have been detected. We now know that the
"5 cm-band" meant 5870-5890 MHz
Submitted by Haile
Received on Sun Dec 07 2014 - 01:43:48 EST