SpaceWar.com - Your World At War
US-Canada military center 'tracks' Santa for 68th year
Washington, Dec 25 (AFP) Dec 25, 2023
The joint US-Canadian military monitoring agency has continued its decades-long Christmas tradition of tracking Santa's whereabouts, helping children around the globe find out when his reindeer-powered, present-filled sleigh is coming to town.

A 3-D, interactive website at www.noradsanta.org showed Santa Claus and his reindeer on their imagined worldwide delivery route, allowing users to click and learn more about the various cities along the way.

The Santa tracker presented by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) dates to 1955, when a Colorado newspaper advertisement printed a phone number to connect children with Santa but mistakenly directed them to the hotline for the military nerve center.

To avoid disappointing the little ones, NORAD's director of operations at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup, ordered his staff to check the radar to see where Old Saint Nick might be and update the children on his location.

Sixty-eight years later NORAD is continuing the tradition of setting up a temporary call center out of its Colorado headquarters to answer children's burning questions.

A photo posted by the group on Facebook showed rows of people answering phones, some in uniform and others wearing red Santa caps.

Some top-level US dignitaries -- namely President Joe Biden and wife Jill Biden -- joined in on the holiday action.

"This evening, the President and First Lady participated in the North American Aerospace Defense Command Santa tracking calls with children and families across the country," the White House said in a statement.

Earlier Sunday the tracker went down for a short while, leaving children in the Pacific region in the dark about his exact position.

"Hey #SantaTrackers! We may be having a couple of technical difficulties with our tracking map, but #Santa is still flying! He is headed to Fiji next!" the group which runs the tracker said on their Facebook page, before announcing a fix one hour later.

Father Christmas had begun his journey with an out-of-this-world first stop, according to NORAD: the International Space Station orbiting Earth.

The reindeer-pulled sleigh was also seen traversing Israel as well as crossing over southern Gaza, criss-crossing Africa, and venturing southward to Palmer Station, a research facility in Antarctica.

Santa then headed up through South America, bound for the United States, unloading approximately 100,000 gifts every second for about 4.9 billion total presents as of 0130 GMT Monday, according to the tracker.

When not spreading holiday cheer, NORAD conducts aerospace and maritime control and warning operations -- including monitoring for missile launches from North Korea, something that may be on Santa's mind this year as he passes over, with the most recent ICBM test just days ago.


ADVERTISEMENT




Space News from SpaceDaily.com
Axiom-4 astronauts arrive at the International Space Station
ICEYE to deliver persistent radar imaging to NATO for enhanced space-based intelligence sharing
Kongsberg completes N3X satellite network for maritime surveillance

24/7 Energy News Coverage
Trump says China can continue to buy Iranian oil
EU unveils new state aid rules in boon for nuclear, renewables
China's Xiaomi receives almost 300,000 SUV pre-orders in minutes

Military Space News, Nuclear Weapons, Missile Defense
No talks between the United States and Iran planned 'as of now'
Astroscale to lead UK Orpheus mission with GBP 5.15M defence contract
Zelensky says discussed buying US air-defence systems with Trump

24/7 News Coverage
The mixed fortunes of development aid
Syria's wheat war: drought fuels food crisis for 16 million
Global tensions rattle COP30 build-up but 'failure not an option'



All rights reserved. Copyright Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.