Alexis Truitt, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)
Keywords: space debris, debris, ssa, sda
Abstract:
The IARPA SINTRA program aims to investigate the interaction of orbital debris with the surrounding space environment and drive the state of the art to detect, track, and characterize lethal non-trackable orbital space debris. Space debris poses a risk to all space missions, including those of the Intelligence Community (IC). With an average low Earth orbit (LEO) impact velocity of 22,500 MPH, even the smallest of debris can cause significant damage. Currently, there are over 100 million objects greater than 1 mm orbiting the Earth, however, less than 1 percent of debris that can cause mission-ending damage are currently tracked. Due to the dynamic nature of the near-Earth space environment, predicting the trajectory of the debris is extremely difficult necessitating persistent monitoring. While debris larger than 10 cm can be detected and tracked, smaller debris cannot be tracked using current capabilities. Therefore, there is an increased interest in tracking debris less than 10 cm. The detection, tracking, and characterization of lethal non-trackable space debris would support the safe operation of valuable space assets worldwide.
SINTRA is planned as four-year program which will drive the state-of-the-art for exploitation of data from existing sensors and new low-cost sensors capable of detecting orbital debris signatures, demonstrating debris tracking and characterization, and developing automated methods for signature analysis.
Date of Conference: September 19-22, 2023
Track: Space Debris