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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.
