Ascension Island a staging point by the British military during the Falklands War. Ascension Island hosts one of four ground antennas (others are on Kwajalein Island, Diego Garcia, and Cape Canaveral) that assist in the operation of the Global Positioning System (GPS) navigational system. NASA operates a Meter Class Autonomous Telescope (MCAT) on Ascension Island for tracking orbital debris, which is potentially hazardous to operating spacecraft and astronauts, at a facility called the John Africano NASA/AFRL Orbital Debris Observatory. In 1501, the Portuguese navigator Afonso de Albuquerque sighted the island on Ascension Day (which fell on 21 May that year) and named
5th Portuguese India Armada (Albuquerque, 1503) Cochin. On the other hand, the chroniclers also report difficulties in finding enough spice supplies to load up the ships, and so Albuquerque may have opened up negotiations in an effort to have the pepper blockade relaxed so they could load up their ships and maybe even secure a modicum of peace for the Portuguese factories after the armada leaves. Whomever initiated it, the peace terms were soon agreed upon in mid-December 1503: the Zamorin is to deliver 1500 "bahars" of pepper as compensation for the Portuguese factory in Calicut, to expel the Arab merchants from Calicut (some say only