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) push across the Atlantic Ocean towards the Cape. May/June 1503 - In the meantime, the Third Squadron was a pilotage disaster. Caught by a storm off Cape Verde, two of the ships, those of António de Saldanha and Rui Lourenço Ravasco, were caught by the equatorial counter-current and sailed by mistake into the Gulf of Guinea. They ended up at São Tomé island, with no idea where their third ship (that of Diogo Fernandes Pereira) might have been. (The story of their subsequent misadventures will be told separately below). June/July 1503 - The second squadron of Francisco de Albuquerque, apparently