Response “Exponential Growth” of Commercial Space
L3Harris has been awarded a $49.7 million order to continue work to upgrade the US Space Force (USSF) Advanced Tracking and Launch Analysis System (ATLAS).
The order – part of Space Systems Command’s overarching contract for development of ATLAS – covers a performance period of 24 months, with a minimum set of capabilities to be delivered by the end of September this year. The work will eventually enable Space Command to decommission the Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC), and provide a far more comprehensive space domain awareness (SDA) capability.
SDA involves identifying, characterising and understanding the growing number of objects in near-Earth space. As both commercial and government-operated spacecraft proliferate, and anti-satellite systems are fielded and operationally tested, so the amount of debris in Earth orbit increases. There was widespread condemnation of a test carried out last December by Russia, in which a missile fired from Earth was used to destroy a disused satellite in low Earth orbit: the test was a success, in that it destroyed the Russian spacecraft – but Space Command estimated that it left over 1,500 pieces of trackable debris in orbit.
The laws of physics dictate that if even a tiny object is moving at tremendous speed towards another object, the force of impact can be huge. The problem has been growing for some time. In 1983, NASA released imagery showing the crater formed in the windshield of a Space Shuttle orbiter after it was struck by a fleck of paint less than half a millimetre across. A slightly larger object could have punctured the windshield, leading to loss of the spacecraft. Pieces of debris smaller than 10cm cannot be tracked using currently fielded space surveillance technology. While larger pieces of debris will eventually begin to fall towards Earth and burn up as they re-enter the atmosphere, smaller pieces with far lower masses may take much longer to de-orbit, effectively remaining as threats to spacecraft – many of them invisible to current SDA systems – indefinitely.
Among the minimum capabilities L3Harris is set to deliver by the end of September will be automated processing and maintenance of an astrometric baseline – “the space catalog of all known space objects,” as USSF explains. The system will also be able to associate manual and automated observations; determine orbits; process uncorrelated tracks both manually and automatically; and process satellite conjunctions (the preferred term to ‘collisions’).
“Anti-satellite threats have increased and require attention now,” Ed Zoiss, President of L3Harris’s space and airborne systems division, said. “We are responding to the urgency by partnering with the Space Force to modernize space domain awareness assets that are key to understanding and acting on those threats.”
