Did you ever hear of a satellite called Parcae (pronounced like park-eye)? If you haven’t, don’t feel bad—it was, after all, a top-secret project only revealed in July 2023. [Ivan Amato] not only heard about it, but also wrote a fascinating peek into the cloak-and-dagger world of cold-war spy satellites for this month’s IEEE Spectrum.
According to [Ivan], the satellite helped the United States to keep track of Russian submarines and was arguably the most capable orbiting spy platform ever. Or, at least, that we get to hear about.
Given that it was built in the 1970s, it was amazing that the satellite wasn’t very large. The craft itself seemed small compared to its solar panels. Even today, the satellite remains a bit of a mystery. While the NRO—the US spy satellite agency—did acknowledge its existence in 2023, there is very little official information about it, although, apparently, other curious people have unearthed data on Parcae over the years. According to the NRO, the satellites have not been in use since 2008.
The Parcae—named after the Romans’ three fates—worked in groups of three and launched in a “dispenser” that carried the trio of spaceships. They could listen to radio emissions from ships and use very accurate clocks to pinpoint their location based on the slight differences in the time each satellite heard the signal.
One of the system’s unique features was that thanks to a minicomputer, ship positions could be in users’ hands in minutes. That doesn’t sound so impressive today, but it was an amazing achievement for that time.
The article goes into more detail about how the individual satellites used a gravity boom for orientation and a lot of details about the designers. Of course, some of what Parcae could do is still secret for now, so there may be more to this story later.
Spy satellites can’t always hide from backyard telescopes. Spy satellites always have impressive technology and—presumably—big budgets.
For more info, please check the mandatory link to the Gunter’s database (thanks!): https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/noss-1.htm
Thanks so much for that link. Very useful! I’m an ex Classic Wiz op here. Always wondered why all this was phased out late 90’s and early 2000’s
I had the occasion to visit a (very) decommissioned CLASSIC BULLSEYE (FRD-10) /CLASSIC WIZARD (WHITE CLOUD/PARCAE) site a few years ago. The CDAA concrete was still in place, the very dark building was in the center and the antenna foundations for the CLASSIC WIZARD dishes were still present.
It’s still on Google Earth — PARCAE site is to the north of the CDAA:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/jSDhZP8Bb3MyLgz98
Interesting project. Kind of like a reverse GPS — multiply positioned satellite receivers locating a ground emitter instead of the other way around.
IEEE has a short article, which confirms (final para) that it was a very challenging engineering project.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/reconnaissance-satellite
So, like what Hawkeye does today…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HawkEye_360
The tenth and final trio went up on Transporter 11 out of Vandenberg in August ’24
And I can neither confirm nor deny that the name “Hawkeye” is a nod to “Parcae.”
:-)
Love gravity booms and other passive orientation control systems like that. There was this massive cylinder that nasa deployed into space for several years to test materials, and it was totally mechanically stabilized. no electronics of any kind. some really genius engineering.
That was the Long Duration Exposure Facility. Yes, gravity-gradient stabilized. Which, by itself, is not sufficient: You also need a damper to quench the oscillations, like a shock absorber in a car suspension. In the case of the LDEF, this was also a passive, mechanical device.
I watched the live action on NASA Select of the pickup mission.
Search “killer tomatoes in space” for made in space comedy!