CHANDLER AUTOMATED SYSTEMS LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: J201-CSO1

Description

On Friday, Jan. 31, 2020, there was a near-miss in orbit above Pittsburgh, PA - two inoperative satellites that have been circling the planet for many years, on opposite-direction orbits, came within approximately 100 feet of one another at 32,800 mph. Had they collided, the debris field from that event would have endangered potentially hundreds of other space assets also circling the globe. Even small pieces of debris can cause catastrophic damage to high-value satellites, many of which are critical operational devices on which our nation depends each day.  The warfighters responsible for managing satellite command and control face a huge challenge in their task load each day, building awareness of potential events like this by gathering as much available data as possible, from sources as diverse as ground sensors, social media feeds, amateur astronomer observations, published observations from private firms, data made available by observers in other countries, as well as data collected by the USAF. The main problem with the current command and control situation is that data comes in too slowly, and in such a high volume, that it is impossible for a human operator to make sense of it fast enough to react in time to prevent catastrophe. Most of the time, operators can only deal with assets over which they have direct control, and if a threat assessment is made only moments before a potential collision, there is little an operator can do at that point to mitigate the threat to assets worth literally billions of dollars. Vigilant proposes to adapt our "Layer-8" Intelligent Workspace solution, leveraging it's AI and Machine Learning capabilities to address the need for improved satellite command and control functions in a hybrid architecture. The goal is to support and improve the current satellite command and control structure, developing adaptations that provide autonomous threat detection and assessment, course-of-action responses, case-based reasoning for alerting, real-time data fusion, and microservices developed in support of simulations. The adaptation would also address the objective of machine-to-machine notifications and tactical/operational replanning, developing the ability of satellites to "talk" to each other through the system, making satellites "smarter" about their environment and decreasing the time it takes for appropriate actions to be taken by operators when threats are present.  This adaptation of the Vigilant Intelligent Workspace meets Air Force objectives laid out in Focus Area 23: Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Dual Use Technologies by addressing the specific objectives in Focus Area 22.2: Ubiquitous Satellite Command, Control, and Operations, which is a perfect fit for our technology. There are many other potential customers distributed throughout the Air Force, and other areas of the DoD, that would potentially benefit from this solution; discovering those customers would also be a primary goal of this effort.