The Problem This Solution Solves
Currently, there are more than 1,500 satellites, 17,000 objects greater than 10 centimeters in diameter, and more than 150 million smaller objects orbiting Earth. With debris traveling in excess of eight kilometers per second, even the smallest of these objects can cause significant damage and potentially disable a spacecraft in orbit. Moreover, space control and traffic management are manpower-intensive activities, requiring automation to improve capacity and safety.
The Solution
Numerica’s solution provided an increased ability to view, characterize, and predict the changing physical location of natural and manmade objects in orbit around the Earth via Commercially Augmented Mission Operations (CAMO) prototype. Specifically, Numerica successfully leveraged advanced algorithms, high-performance software, and a newly designed and deployed global network of remote robotic telescopes and wide field-of-view sensor arrays. Numerica successfully performed data integration activities necessary to format and transmit relevant SSA data products to the Unified Data Library (UDL) in near real-time.
To demonstrate successful integration of their solution, Numerica pushed sensor observations, state vectors with covariance information, and derived orbital element sets to the UDL. Over the lifetime of the contract, Numerica delivered over 100M observations, hundreds of thousands of state vectors, thousands of maneuver alerts, and over 75M image chips to over 150 consumers.