Automated Tasking of Ground-Based Satellite Surveillance Sensors

This project supports the Joint Commercial Operations (JCO), an organization within the United States Space Command (USSPACECOM), whose mission is to "augment the National Space Defense Center’s protect-and-defend mission, providing unclassified indications of orbital activity derived through public research, commercial Space Domain Awareness (SDA) sensors, and analytical tools." Currently, the primary system conducting surveillance in geostationary orbit (GEO) is the Operationally Responsive Space 5 (ORS-5). The ORS-5 is a satellite in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) observing GEO whilst detecting satellites with a revisit rate of under two hours. The ORS-5 is nearing its end of life, and the JCO is considering options for either replacing the ORS-5 or leveraging commercial services. The JCO purchases unclassified satellite surveillance data collected by commercial ground-based electro-optical (EO) sensors to support SDA. The three primary EO sensor providers are ExoAnalytic Solutions, Lockheed Martin, and Slingshot Aerospace. Currently, the JCO manually requests sensors to observe specific satellites in GEO. The JCO’s High Rate Revisit (HRR) list provides satellite priority level, which determines how frequently they should be observed. This study develops a framework to match commercial sensors to satellites given their surveillance requirements. Our framework provides a proof of concept for identifying commercial-based sensors capable of observing a specific satellite. This study provides a weight-ranked menu of options for potential sensors to observe the satellites. Several criteria factor into the list rankings including the number of unique satellites observed, the level of activity of the sensor, and the number of high priority satellites recently observed. This menu of options provides the JCO with recommendations for which sensors should observe certain satellites.