Kipp M. Johnson (Systems Engineer, SASSA Program), Captain Farakh Zaman (Program Manager, SASSA Program)
Keywords: Novel Approaches, SSA Sensing, Electro-Optical
Abstract:
The heritage of Space Situational Awareness (SSA) has been limited to Earth based observation of space to support collision avoidance and space object identification. In part, this has led to reliance on multiple CONUS locations for optical and non-optical ground based observation. It has also led to the specialization of many fields and industries, which are highlighted at conferences like AMOS through discussion of state-of-the-art of observation capabilities. This paradigm alone no longer addresses the current needs for situational awareness of space assets in the changing space culture. Events in recent years have shown that space based sensing capabilities are increasingly critical as complements to ground based radar and optical systems. The SSA community would be better served by adopting the concept of local SSA and proliferating technologies to accomplish this. The traditional definition of SSA would expand to encompass an understanding of the immediate natural and manmade environment of the satellite. Multiple insights would be enabled, including baseline trending to support anomaly identification and resolution, catastrophic failure investigation, and anomaly and/or failure attribution. Additionally, protection measures could potentially be enabled to ensure space asset availability. Moving forward with a combination of traditional SSA and local SSA capabilities would allow a potential global SSA picture to be developed. This enhanced understanding would consist of ground observations in addition to the satellites first person perspective. The potential for an exponentially increased comprehension of SSA is created by this powerful combination. The first step toward demonstrating this combination of SSA knowledge has been achieved with data from the SASSA Technology Demonstration.
Date of Conference: September 11-14, 2012
Track: Novel Approaches to Electro-optical SSA Sensing