Officially established on 1 Oct 2004 and was operationally accepted on 1 Oct 2005 as a component of the 20th Space Control Squadron headquartered at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. The unit was established to assume operations from the Navy of the nations oldest space surveillance radar, informally known as the ‘‘Fence.” In addition the unit also took on the Navy’s Alternate Space Control Center (ASCC) mission as the backup computational and command & control node for the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC-Mtn) at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base, Colorado. The detachment is comprised of 10 active duty Air Force, 41 Air Force civilians, and 100-plus contractor personnel working to support Dahlgren operations and also operate the nine remote field stations that make up the newly named ‘‘Air Force Space Surveillance System (AFSSS).”

The nine AFSSS field stations, designed to track satellites and debris in orbit around the Earth, consist of a bi-static radar that points straight up into space and produces a ‘‘fence” of electromagnetic energy. The system can detect basketball-sized objects in orbit around the Earth out to an effective range of 15,000 nautical miles. More than five million satellite detections, or observations, are collected by the AFSSS each month. Data collected is transmitted to a computer center at Dahlgren, where it is used to constantly update a space object catalog of spacecraft and debris critical in maintaining space situational awareness.

The ASCC is responsible as a backup to the Joint Space Operations Center of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, located inside Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station in Colorado Springs. It is responsible for tracking objects larger than 10 centimeters orbiting the Earth. The unit maintains around the clock, 365 days a year, support to constantly track these objects. They task the Space Surveillance Network, a worldwide network of 19 space surveillance sensors (radar and optical telescopes, both military and civilian) to observe the objects. Then the crews use computers at Dahlgren to match sensor observations to the more than 10,000 man-made orbiting objects and update the position of each one. These updates form the Space Catalog, a comprehensive listing of the numbers, types, and orbits of man-made objects in space.