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Tonopah Test Range (TTR) in Nevada became Sandia's permanent test reange when the Salton Sea (California) test base closed. Sandia's field testing of its components and weapons designs has been extensive. The Labs also provided support for nuclear tests in Nevada and the Pacific.
Sandia introduced the Permissive Action Link (PAL). Serving as an electromagnetic security lock, the PAL prevents unauthorized use of nuclear weapons.
The Laminar Air Flow Clean Room was developed, making possible the assembly of microelectronics. Clean-room technology has had an ongoing and critical impact on space programs, manufacturing, medicine, and the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries.
In 1961, the first Vela satellites were launched. Vela (Spanish for watchfulness, or vigil) satellites were deployed to detect nuclear detonations, first in space and later in the Earth's atmosphere. Sandia provided the Earth-looking optical sensors, as well as the data processing, logic, and power subsystems to support the detection instruments for Vela, marking the beginning of the Labs' involvement in treaty verification technologies.
Terrorism at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich brought international attention to questions of physical security. Sandia, already involved in the protection of nuclear materials and weapons, offered training opportunities for agencies concerned with physical security and developed more formidable barriers to protect crucial sites--nuclear reactors, for example.
The energy crisis during 1973 and national concerns about energy use and dependence encouraged the pursuit of viable alternative energy technologies. Sandia responded with research on solar and wind technology, photovoltaics, enhanced fossil fuel recovery, and fusion development. Research on central reciever technology led to the deployment of Solar One, the first commercial solar-electrical plant, and its successor, Solar Two.
Supporting nuclear weapon tests had given Sandia extensive experience in monitoring and measuring nuclear detonations and, beginning in the early 1960s, the Labs used this knowledge to develop a series of monitoring technologies in support of arms control treaties. In addition to components for satellites, a series od seismic detection systems have been deployed to detect nuclear detonations. Deveoped in 1977, the National Seismic Station was one in a series of ever more refined systems created for this purpose.
In 1981, the theory and design of strained-layer superlattices was developed at Sandia. These are a new class of semiconductors with revolutionary applications in the nation's microelectronics industry. Sandia's research in microelectronics grew out of the need for small, reliable components.
Martin Marietta took over Sandia's management contract in 1993. In 1995, Martin Marietta merged with Lockheed to become Lockheed Martin.
Sandia's "cradle to grave" responsibility for nuclear weapons includes partnering with other national laboratories, the military services, and industry, to ensure the reliability of tyhe weapons and to oversee their removal from the nuclear stockpile when they are retired.
To test weapon components and to simulate nuclear detonations, Sandia has created three of the world's most powerful accelerators--HERMES III for gamma rays, Saturn for X-rays, and the Particle Beam Fusion Accelerator II for ion beams. In 1996, Saturn produced a record breaking 85 terrawatts of power--more than 50 times the output of the entire U.S. utility grid.
The world's fastest computer, the massively parallel teraflops machine, becomes fully operational at Sandia. The teraflops (which stands for one trillion floating point operations per second) has hearly 600 billion bytes of memory and is capable of performing up to 1.8 teraflops. Although used in various ways, this "ultracomputer" was built to help develop the higher-resolution, three-dimensional physics modeling needed to evaluate the aging nuclear weapons stockpile without actual full-scale nuclear testing.
