USAF WANTS SELF-​​AWARE SATELLITES

The pos­si­bil­ity of a sneak attack in space has the Pentagon spooked. And one of the things that makes Rummy & Co. the most ner­vous is that nobody has a clue what’s actu­ally up there in orbit. Imagine how vast and opaque the seas must have seen to World War I-​​era com­man­ders, and you’ll get the idea.
There are an array of efforts under­way to try to fix this. But a just-​​introduced Air Force pro­gram wins the coolest name award. And it could be in the run­ning for a biggest-​​bang-​​for-​​the-​​buck prize, too, if it ever gets off of the ground.
“The Self-​​Aware Satellite” (scroll waaay down) starts with the premise that orbiters already have a lot of sen­sors on board. But these instru­ments are ori­ented inward, to keep tabs on the satellite’s health. What’s worse, many of the sen­sors “are fixed and uni-​​purpose, and they can­not be accessed in a way incon­sis­tent with this orig­i­nally envi­sioned pur­pose,” the Air Force notes.
The Self-​​Aware Satellite also known as Satellite-​​As-​​A-​​Sensor, or SAAS looks to break that rigid mold, and let free up the orbiters’ instrumentation.

In SAAS, all sen­sor data is posted to a cen­tral­ized data­base, which can be freely accessed in real-​​time by a satellite’s own processor(s). Sensors can fur­ther­more be redi­rected to other pur­poses. For exam­ple, a tim­ing, teleme­try and con­trol (TT&C) radio can be retar­geted to behave as a radio-​​frequency (RF) threat-​​warning sen­sor when not oth­er­wise engaged. Correlations between sen­sors can be ana­lyzed by the plat­form on orbit. When com­bined with an autonomous abil­ity to exploit the infor­ma­tion for short-​​loop respon­sive actions, a “self-​​aware” satel­lite is created.

But pulling off this trick means doing a big time rework­ing of satel­lites’ closed and cen­tral­ized soft­ware. And it means repro­gram­ming sen­sors, so they can spot both inter­nal trou­ble as well as threats from without.

November 24th, 2004 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.