NUMERICA CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: AF162-D002

Description

Space operations centers and satellite operators are continually being challenged with maintaining situational awareness on a growing number of resident space objects and with protecting key assets from hazards and potential threats. This trend necessitates pursuing multiple non-traditional approaches to not only free-up sensor/operator/analyst resources, but also to expand one's ability to characterize the evolving and dynamic space environment. Under a prior Phase II SBIR, Numerica developed and demonstrated the feasibility of collecting non-traditional satellite tracking data to build and maintain a deep-space catalog, independent from the public catalog and inclusive of all objects in geostationary Earth orbit (GEO). High levels of catalog completeness, accuracy, and timeliness were achieved through the use of advanced algorithms and high-performance software, together with the customization, deployment, and operation of a global network of small telescopes. The significance of this opportunity is to further develop the technologies necessary to produce a commercially-viable catalog maintenance, search, and uncorrelated track (UCT) processing solution. This includes deploying additional telescopes to increase overall network capacity and maturing Numericas end-to-end tasking collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination (TCPED) pipeline.