Space Force to prototype new software to fuse commercial, military space tracking data

Satellites and space debris in orbit around Earth. (Aerospace Corporation)

MAUI ― The Space Force is planning to develop new prototype software designed to automate the integration of commercial and military space tracking data to provide more timely and more accurate information.

Col. Barry Croker, who heads up the service’s Mission Delta 2, said Thursday that the plan is to launch the prototype “software environment” later this fall and to build a “minimum viable product” that can be up and running quickly.

Mission Delta 2 is responsible for organizing, training and equipping Guardians to undertake space domain awareness operations. It includes the 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons that operate the Space Surveillance Network of telescopes and radars around the globe and the software systems required to analyze the data they gather about space objects, in particular those operated by potential adversaries.

“Our number one priority right now is: How do we improve support to space control operations?” Croker told Breaking Defense in an interview on the margins of the annual AMOS (Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance) here.

To do that, Croker said, he said, having “a bias towards timeliness” rather than seeking the highest accuracy levels as current software and processes for analyzing data from military software does. For instance, the prototype could include lower fidelity, but faster observations and analysis now provided by commercial firms monitoring the heavens.

“I now have the opportunity to get a more timely state of something, even if it’s not perfect,” he said, for example, a new debris cloud or a “whole bunch of satellites” newly launched.

“Now I can start to have a more timely indication of what’s going on. So that’s the big, that’s the number one focus,” Crocker said.

At the moment, the Space Force acquires commercial space tracking information via the Joint Commercial Operations cell, and houses that information in the cloud-based Unified Data Library . But that data is not fused directly into operational space domain awareness computer systems, instead running on a “parallel” system, according to Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of SPACECOM.

He told reports here on Wednesday that current space domain awareness capabilities are not yet up to snuff to ensure precise targeting of adversary satellites and that being able to automatically integrate commercial space tracking data would go a long way to filling those gaps.

“We could take the largest step forward if we could just better integrate the [commercial] data and consistently fund the the acquisition of that data, and then be able to drive it into our programs of record for space domain awareness. That would be the biggest initial step we could take, and we could take that in the short term,” Whiting said.

While data fusion is the goal, Croker explained the reason for setting up a separate software environment is to ensure that tracking based on military sensors doesn’t get watered down by integrating commercial data that may not have the same high accuracy.

So the idea is to start “with having the right environments that I can do that type of work and not perturbate the high accuracy collision avoidance type missions,” he said.

环绕地球运行的卫星和太空碎片。（航空航天公司）

毛伊岛——美国太空部队计划开发一种新的原型软件，旨在自动整合商业和军事太空跟踪数据，以提供更及时、更准确的信息。

负责该军种“三角洲2号任务”的巴里·克罗克上校周四表示，计划于今年秋季晚些时候推出原型“软件环境”，并构建一个可以快速投入运行的“最小可行产品”。

“德尔塔2号”任务负责组织、训练和装备“守护者”部队，以执行太空领域感知作战任务。它包括第18和第19太空防御中队，这两个中队负责运营遍布全球的太空监视网络（由望远镜和雷达组成），以及分析其收集到的太空物体数据（特别是潜在对手操控的物体数据）所需的软件系统。

“我们目前的首要任务是：如何改进对太空控制行动的支持？”克罗克在一年一度的毛伊岛高级光学和空间监视会议（AMOS）期间接受《防务新闻》采访时表示。

克罗克表示，为了实现这一目标，他们“更注重时效性”，而不是像目前用于分析军事软件数据的软件和流程那样追求最高的精确度。例如，该原型可以采用精度较低但速度更快的观测和分析方法，而这些方法目前是由商业天文监测公司提供的。

“我现在有机会更及时地了解某些事物的状态，即使它并不完美，”他举例说，比如新的碎片云或“一大批”新发射的卫星。

“现在我可以更及时地了解情况了。所以这是最重要的，也是首要关注点，”克罗克说。

目前，太空部队通过联合商业运营中心获取商业太空跟踪信息，并将这些信息存储在基于云的统一数据库中。但据太空司令部司令斯蒂芬·惠廷将军称，这些数据并没有直接融合到作战空间态势感知计算机系统中，而是在一个“并行”系统上运行。

他周三告诉记者，目前太空领域的感知能力还不足以确保对敌方卫星进行精确打击，而能够自动整合商业太空跟踪数据将大大有助于弥补这些差距。

“如果我们能够更好地整合（商业）数据，并持续为这些数据的获取提供资金，然后将其纳入我们用于空间领域感知的既定项目中，我们就能向前迈出最大的一步。这将是我们能够采取的最重要的第一步，而且我们可以在短期内实现，”怀廷说道。

克罗克解释说，虽然数据融合是目标，但建立单独的软件环境的原因是确保基于军事传感器的跟踪不会因为集成可能不具备同样高精度的商业数据而降低精度。

因此，他的想法是“首先要创造合适的环境，让我能够完成这类工作，而不会干扰高精度的防撞任务”。