Eric Felt, Space Vehicles Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory; Timothy Sejba, Advanced Systems and Development Directorate, Space & Missile Systems Center
Keywords: SSA architecture, big data, data fusion, proliferation
Abstract:
The US Space Enterprise is continuing to pivot towards the Space Warfighting Construct, with an emphasis on resilient, disaggregated, proliferated platforms, agile business practices, and emphasis on partnerships. The Air Force Research Lab has taken a leading role in advancing all three of these areas through science and technology, new strategies such as Space Accelerators for engaging nontraditional partners through novel business mechanisms, and broad international cooperation.
Space Situational Awareness, in particular, is poised to take advantage of the wealth of partnerships and data that the coming years will bring. The Space Surveillance Network is already a distributed architecture. Augmentation by commercial, international, and academia will bring it to a state of true proliferation, and with that state will come a need for information agility that we as a community must begin addressing now.
First, we must agree on open architecture standards for messaging and data, and these must be extensible to new sensors, new sensor types/modalities, advanced orbit determination approaches, and must include elements of object identification, not just metric tracking.
Second, we must create the culture and technology to allow data to flow. Data cannot just flow into repositories; it must also be allowed to flow out, providing data sets to the community at large to develop new tools to make use of it.
Third, we must develop the tools to make sense of this torrent of data. We need to understand how to fuse different modalities of data to provide better metric tracking and object identification. We must have robust analytical tools to understand the performance of the entire system and where new technologies can improve performance. Finally, key to such a broad distributed network, we must develop tools to validate data, to appropriately identify and either correct or dismiss outliers.
The future of SSA holds many exciting promises and challenges. AFRL looks forward to working through a wealth of partnerships to solve them.
Date of Conference: September 11-14, 2018
Track: Featured