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) which Empoli probably is) and, a couple of weeks later, by the captain-major Afonso de Albuquerque himself. All three ships of the third squadron (Antonio de Saldanha, Rui Lourenço Ravasco and Diogo Fernandes Pereira) would miss that year's summer monsoon and would only cross the Indian Ocean the next year (1504). The 4th Armada of Vasco da Gama had left India in the early months of 1503 with little resolved. Despite terror, bombardment and blockade, Calicut remained defiant, and the two fledgling Portuguese factories in allied cities - one in Cochin, the other in Cannanore - were vulnerable to her