The observatory was built by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory for the United States Air Force and was called the Haystack Microwave Research Facility.

[3] The Haystack Observatory site is also the location of the Millstone Hill Geospace Facility, an atmospheric-sciences research center.

The system was capable of sensitivity of 25 cm resolution, allowing for tracking and imaging satellites out to geostationary orbit distances, as well as deep space objects out to 40,000 km (130,000,000 ft) range.

The system is capable of simultaneous operations in X band and W-band, which allows it to better determine the size, shape, orientation, and motion of orbiting objects.

The system contributes data to the United States Space Surveillance Network (SSN).

[10] The 18.3 m (60 ft) Westford Radio Telescope was built in 1961 by Lincoln Laboratory for Project West Ford as an X-band radar antenna.

[15] It is located approximately 1.2 kilometers (0.75 mi) south of the Haystack telescope along the same access road.

Haystack serves as a computational hub for the Event Horizon Telescope, an assemblage of radio telescopes around Earth that combine data for very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) to achieve angular resolution capable of imaging a supermassive black hole's event horizon.

Data are transported on large hard drives from the observing telescopes to Haystack, where a cluster of about 800 CPUs run algorithms to produce black hole imagery.

[17] Millstone Hill Geospace Facility is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric sciences research centre in Westford, Massachusetts, under primary support from the US National Science Foundation's Geospace Facilities section.

[23][24] "Sun Drawings" are projected images created by reflecting sunlight from a variety of materials that are strategically positioned to relate to their specific location on Earth.

Similar installations for the Global Sun Drawing Project have been planned at other astronomically significant locations worldwide, including an exhibit at the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico.