page_title: Ascension Island
section_title: Twenty-first century
hierarchical_section_title: Ascension Island / History / Twenty-first century
caption_attribution_description: English: Wideawake Airfield on Ascension Island with a plane from Air Seychelles (on contract to the UK Ministry of Defence) to maintain the airlink between RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and RAF Mount Pleasant in the Falkland Islands. Left of the centre is Green Mountain, the island's highest summit.
context_page_description: Ascension Island is an isolated volcanic island, 7°56′ south of the Equator in the South Atlantic Ocean. It is about 1,600 kilometres from the coast of Africa and 2,250 kilometres from the coast of Brazil. It is governed as part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, of which the main island, Saint Helena, is around 1,300 kilometres to the southeast. The territory also includes the sparsely-populated Tristan da Cunha archipelago, some 3,730 kilometres to the south, about halfway to the Antarctic Circle.
  The island is named after the day of its recorded discovery, Ascension Day. It was an important safe haven and coaling station to mariners and for commercial airliners during the days of international air travel by flying boats. During World War II it was an important naval and air station, especially providing antisubmarine warfare bases in the Battle of the Atlantic. Ascension Island was garrisoned by the British Admiralty from 22 October 1815 to 1922.
context_section_description: As of 2004, it was reported that the Composite Signals Organisation, an arm of GCHQ, continued to operate a signals interception facility at Cat Hill on Ascension. As of 2007 NASA continued to list Ascension Island as a "downrange site" used for range safety instrumentation. In particular, the Post-Detect Telemetry System used to acquire launch vehicle telemetry includes a station on Ascension.
  In 2008 British diplomats at the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (UN CLCS), requested sovereignty over 200,000 km² (77,220 sq mi) of submarine territory around the island. This would enable exploration into new reserves of oil, gas and minerals, though none are thought to exist.
  The 2009 Constitution order ended Ascension's status as a dependency of St Helena and provided for one Governor of the combined Overseas Territory of St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha.
  In 2016, the United States Department of Energy started operating a mobile climate research facility on the island. It is operated by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility (ARM) near the South East Crater, south of the Green Mountain summit. The field campaign requires the mobile facility to be operational for about 17 months until October 2017.
  The island hosts one of four dedicated ground antennas that assist in the operation of the Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation system (the others are on Diego Garcia (British Indian Ocean Territory), Kwajalein (Marshall Islands), and at Cape Canaveral, Florida (US)). NASA and the US Air Force also operate a Meter-Class Autonomous Telescope (MCAT) on Ascension as part of the deep space surveillance system for tracking orbital debris, which can be a hazard to spacecraft and astronauts.
caption: Wideawake Airfield
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