Eager to take a look at a super-secret U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite?

Now you can thumb through a sourcebook on a Russian satellite tracking facility in Siberia called the Altay Optical Laser Research Center.

Allan Thomson, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst prepared the Russian/English language sourcebook that spotlights the Russian ground equipment capable of cranking out images of high-flying spacecraft.

The sourcebook contains shot-from-the-ground adaptive optics imagery, albeit a bit blurry, of Russian spacecraft, several NASA Earth observing satellites…as well as the NRO’s Lacrosse 2 spysat lofted back in 1991.

Lacrosse (see image) uses powerful cloud-cutting radar for day/night surveillance tasks.

BTW: A second Russian site will be equipped next year with a more powerful satellite-imaging telescope, hardware generally seen similar to a facility the United States operates in Hawaii. That upcoming satellite-scanning, sky-watching Russian equipment is to be located within Savvushka, Zmeinogorskigy area, the Altai territory, according to the sourcebook.

The sourcebook was made available today by Secrecy News from the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy.

Go to:

http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/track/altay.pdf

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