Abandoned village and a huge radio telescope (Irbene, Latvia) Irbene
is an abandoned town that used to be a military center with a developed
infrastructure. The station of space surveillance Zvezdochka has not
been there on the maps till 1993. The place was robbed and deprived of
many things but visitors can still imagine what happened here 20 years
ago. Irbene was built for the purpose of space surveillance and military
men worked with 3 radar telescopes dislocated here. The same devices
were also based in the Crimea and Ussuriisk. There is an opinion that
one of the telescopes was used to bug phone conversations of the State
Department of the USA and submarine centers of Norway.
When Russian troops were to leave Latvia in 1994 they got an order to
prepare the object for its transfer to another state. Soldiers spent
several days on destroying the object, so that it was very difficult for
Latvian scientists to restore it.
Today the telescope is controlled with the help of modern computers.
However, the control is carried out partially as scientists failed to
perform complete restoration.
