A highly secretive defence intelligence facility, on the outskirts of Alice Springs, is likely gathering information about the escalating situation in Ukraine.
The work of the jointly run US and Australian base known as Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap is vital after Russian President Vladimir Putin put his country's nuclear deterrent forces on "high alert".
Political expert Richard Tanter said the base would be playing a crucial role in gathering intelligence through covert communications from the Ukraine and border regions.
"Pine Gap collects two main sources of intelligence," Professor Tanter, from Melbourne University, said.
"One is telephone transmissions, radar transmissions, any kind of electronic transmissions, communications or otherwise.
"It also collects the thermal imagery, that heat bloom, of missiles launching."
Professor Tanter said Pine Gap worked in conjunction with Menwith Hill, a similar base in Yorkshire in the United Kingdom.
"Between the two of ... those satellites, the footprint of them covers everything from the edge of the Pacific, China and Japan, in this case, right through to Russia and Ukraine.
"They'll be listening to Russian military activity nationwide, precisely because that nuclear alert, they'll be watching all nuclear facilities," he said.
Professor Tanter said the bases would also be collecting information about Russian military movement in Belarus, communication from politicians and the military's high command.
"These, of course, are often encrypted, but the job of the National Security Agency is to break that encryption."
He said the teams would be working to build a "full order of battle".
"What that tells them [is] where the Russian forces are and then how they're moving and what they're planning to do."
Professor Tanter said infrared satellites also provide the United States with valuable data about the early warning satellite systems.
"That will give the US firstly assurance that Putin is not launching those nuclear missiles, but more relevantly to the war, tracking the locations of these missiles that the Russians are firing," he said.
Becoming a nuclear target
Professor Tanter said Putin's threat of nuclear weapons had catapulted world politics back to the Cold War.
"What he was using them for was politics and it was a way of trying to push back against the United States, which is clearly embarked on a very serious campaign of economic punishment and destabilisation," he said.
Professor Tanter said Pine Gap would certainly be a nuclear target in the unlikely case of a war between Russia and the United States.
"There's a very high chance that Pine Gap would be attacked quite simply because it provides critical targeting information for the United States in a nuclear war.
"That I'm afraid still makes Pine Gap vulnerable.
"One of the questions for Alice Springs citizens is always: 'What is Pine Gap doing and how do I feel about it?' That's a really important question," he said.
World safer with Pine Gap
Security and intelligence expert John Blaxland said Pine Gap's work was vital.
"[It is] the consistent view of successive Australian governments for more than half a century is that it makes Australia safer," Professor Blaxland, the head of International Security and Intelligence Studies at Australian National University, said.
He said the work at Pine Gap had received bilaterally support since the facility's establishment.
"Successive governments on both political persuasions have consistently endorsed, once they have been briefed on the capability and that is what Pine Gap delivers in terms of bolstered defence capabilities more than offsets the remote risk of vulnerability," he said.
