White Sands Missile Range

White Sands National Park is a national park of the United States located in New Mexico and completely surrounded by White Sands Missile Range. The park covers 145,762 acres (227.8 sq mi; 589.9 km) in the Tularosa Basin, including the southern 41% of a 275 sq mi (710 km) field of white sand dunes composed of gypsum crystals. This gypsum dunefield is the largest of its kind on Earth, with a depth of about 30 feet (9.1 m), dunes as tall as 60 feet (18 m), and about 4.5 billion short tons (4.1 billion metric tons) of gypsum sand.

Approximately 12,000 years ago, the land within the Tularosa Basin featured large lakes, streams, grasslands, and Ice Age mammals. As the climate warmed, rain and snowmelt dissolved gypsum from the surrounding mountains and carried it into the basin. Further warming and drying caused the lakes to evaporate and form selenite crystals. Strong winds then broke up crystals and transported them eastward. A similar process continues to produce gypsum sand today.

Fort Bliss is a United States Army post in New Mexico and Texas, with its headquarters in El Paso, Texas. Established in 1848, the fort was renamed in 1854 to honor Bvt.Lieut.Colonel William W.S. Bliss. It is the largest installation in the United States Army Forces Command (FORSCOM) and second-largest in the Army overall, the largest being the adjacent White Sands Missile Range. Fort Bliss provides the largest contiguous tract (1,500 sq mi or 3,900 km) of restricted airspace in the Continental United States, used for missile and artillery training and testing, and at 992,000 acres (401,000 ha) has the largest maneuver area, ahead of the National Training Center, which has 642,000 acres (260,000 ha).In August 2025 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) opened a detention facility named " Camp East Montana" with a capacity of 1,000, eventually 5,000, detainees on Fort Bliss.

Jornada del Muerto was the name given by the Spanish conquistadors to this desert basin, and the almost waterless 90-mile (140 km) trail across the Jornada beginning north of Las Cruces and ending south of Socorro, New Mexico. The name translates from Spanish as "Dead Man's Journey" or "Route of the Dead Man". The trail was part of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro which led northward from central colonial New Spain, present-day Mexico, to the farthest reaches of the viceroyalty in northern Nuevo México Province (the area around the upper valley of the Rio Grande).

Spaceport America is located in the middle portion of the Jornada del Muerto at an elevation of 4,700 ft (1,400 m). The Trinity nuclear test site, the location of the first test of an atomic bomb in 1945 is in the northern portion of the Jornada.

Socorro (/səˈkɔːroʊ/, sə-KOR-oh) is a city in Socorro County in the U.S. state of New Mexico. It is in the Rio Grande Valley at an elevation of 4,579 feet (1,396 m). At the 2020 census, the population was 8,707. It is the county seat of Socorro County. Socorro is located 74 miles (119 km) south of Albuquerque and 146 miles (235 km) north of Las Cruces.

The instruments used by the LINEAR program are located at Lincoln Laboratory's Experimental Test Site (ETS) on the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) near Socorro, New Mexico.

The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project is a collaboration of the United States Air Force, NASA, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory for the systematic detection and tracking of near-Earth objects. LINEAR was responsible for the majority of asteroid discoveries from 1998 until it was overtaken by the Catalina Sky Survey in 2005. As of 15 September 2011, LINEAR had detected 231,082 new small Solar System bodies, of which at least 2,423 were near-Earth asteroids and 279 were comets. The instruments used by the LINEAR program are located at Lincoln Laboratory's Experimental Test Site (ETS) on the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) near Socorro, New Mexico.