Missile Tracking Service
In any event, Niantic Victory was turned over to the Navy Department in 1960 and assigned to the Military Sea Transportation Service on 11 August for conversion to a range instrumentation ship.
On 27 November, she was renamed Watertown and designated AGM-6. For the next 11 years, she served in the Pacific Ocean in support of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Air Force on the latter service's Western Missile Test Range. She operated as a mobile tracking station, recording test data from missiles and satellites out of range of land-based stations.
Watertown carried instrumentation to track and record flight events for military missile and NASA manned spacecraft, extending the coverage of the tracking network over the Pacific ocean. She was slated at one time to be part of the Apollo 8 recovery team but was dropped from the program. In 1969, she called at Pitcairn Island.
Read more about this topic: USNS Watertown (T-AGM-6)
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