Cameron Harris, Sandia National Labs; Sean Crosby, Sandia National Labs; Bryce Castle, Sandia National Labs; Vishvarath Balasubramanian-Karthikeyan, Sandia National Labs; Stella Yang, Sandia National Labs
Keywords: SSA Observatory, Space Domain Awareness, Autonomous
Abstract:
The increased use of space for commercial and military applications has presented a challenge in maintaining accurate and timely Space Domain Awareness (SDA). Sandia National Laboratories is actively developing and enhancing a fully autonomous pipeline for SDA data acquisition and exploitation. The system, known as SSA Observatory, comprises of a telescope mount, multiple cameras, an observatory dome, a weather station, and monitoring system. This effort’s goal is to facilitate extensive SDA data collection and provide rich metadata for future data exploitation efforts.
The SSA Observatory enables rapid SDA data acquisition and exploitation with minimal human-in-the-loop interaction. SSA Observatory autonomously schedules and collects satellite observations based on visibility and assigned priority. The system supports two modes of data collection: direct tasking by end-users and uncued collection of known visible targets.
SSA Observatory leverages modeling and simulation techniques to schedule target collections. A target is deemed available for tasking if it is in a sensors field of regard, the target is illuminated, the sensor is eclipsed, and the target is outside the lunar exclusion zone. To enable uncued collection, SSA Observatory computes visible windows for catalogued space objects and autonomously schedules and executes the data collection.
For direct tasking by an end-user, SSA Observatory hosts a tasking webpage. For a specified target, a week-long list of pass predictions is presented to the user for selection. NOAA weather data is coupled with observable pass predictions to assist the user in identifying ideal task windows. A dangerous weather forecast will not preclude a user from selecting the pass window for tasking, though unsafe weather at execution time will ultimately prevent a task from being completed.
SSA Observatory must be resilient against power/network outages and hazardous weather conditions to operate autonomously and without supervision. The SSA Observatory system integrates with the Beats platform to monitor for outages. SSA Observatory integrates a weather sensor for real-time safety monitoring, and actively checks local weather conditions, including precipitation, wind, and temperature. The observatory dome is an Astro Haven clamshell dome. The system automatically shuts the dome when the weather conditions become unsafe. The dome also shuts when there are no active tasks, to mitigate the risk of exposing hardware to harmful conditions in the event of power loss.
SSA Observatory supports tasking for all near-Earth orbital regimes, including low-earth orbit (LEO). Collected images are saved in FITS format, and image files include metadata to facilitate downstream exploitation. Sensors image in the visible spectrum, and some components in the system can down-select spectral bands using an attached filter wheel. Imagery metadata includes mount pointing angles, capture epoch, integration time, and instantaneous weather data, which are useful for orbit determination and object characterization.
Sky imagery is stored on an internal cloud service, and available to a broad community of relevant data consumers for processing and analysis. A post-processing suite is in active development for the system. The post-processing routines perform streak detection and plate solving of sky imagery and will be kicked off automatically as data becomes available.
The expected outcome of this effort is an analysis of design decisions, discussion of challenges, presentation of imagery, and demonstration of some post-processing capabilities.
Date of Conference: September 19-22, 2023
Track: SDA Systems & Instrumentation