Julie Anand and Damon Sauer, “Calibration Mark AD48 with Satellites,” from Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks (courtesy the artists).
Strange colossal shapes dot the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, x-shaped relics of a once top-secret Cold War spying project. Known as the Corona program, the surveillance initiative by the CIA and US Air Force involved using satellites to take aerial photographs of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The cameras on these satellites were calibrated with concrete crosses 60 feet in diameter. Their exposed 70mm film was later jettisoned in space, the parachuting capsules caught in mid-air by plane. The calibration markers helped assure that the film was in focus, and that there was a landscape measure to accurately assess the size of pictured objects.
Approximately 256 of these markers were placed on a 16-square-mile grid in Arizona, spaced a mile apart. Long after Corona’s end and its declassification in 1995, around 100 remain. Phoenix-based artists Julie Anand and Damon Sauer have spent three years tracking them down for a project called Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks.
You can read all about this, and see more at Hyperallergic.
That is SO cool!
I did not know about the calibration marks. That andwers another set of questions about the early development of spy satellites and GPS -- I wondered how they knew where they were (presumably GPS and guide stars now)
CORONA was how the government determined the missile gap and bomber gap were wrong. Of course they used them anyway for a decade, because propaganda and money and power.
I wish we weren’t leaving so much evidence of war littered all over the place, but maybe there won’t be descendants digging this stuff up a thousand years from now.
Marcus, knew you’d be all over this. How about the Google Earth links to the area?
More evidence for ancient astronauts!
This is some cool shit, but at the same time, this is some shit that’s all over the world -- can’t go 5k in this country without coming across some rotting Cold War relic. It’s all really neat (the technology! advancement! progress! SPIES!) but at the same time, so depressing -- so much resources put into this one confrontational and violent aspect of civilization, but once the obvious confrontation ended, the resources did, too. All these fantastic facilities that could have gone towards research and development? Rotting to pieces by the sea. Or in the interior. Just… useless waste.
rq:
It speaks to the all encompassing waste of war, a waste on every level.
Also what a senseless motivator it is -- so many things it motivates to do or develop in science, even those things by accident, aren’t enough in and of themselves to encourage the same kind of doing or developing (I don’t mean in terms of things or progress as such, but the speed and importance and emphasis). It takes a conflict to bring people together, that whole bit about a common enemy.
I hate it.
rq:
Yes. I hate that too. If we, as a species, spent even a fraction of our time towards play, rather than war, we would be so much better off.
There are still a few of these where I work in the summer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Early_Warning_Line
Things like that, chigau, make me want to spend a summer working with you. Not that I’m qualified, but it seems like it would be an Experience.