AFIT alum Capt Daniel Moomey's (M.S. Space Systems, 2015), master's thesis is the basis for the feature article in the November-December 2015 issue of the Air & Space Power Journal

A Call to Action:
Aid Geostationary Space Situational Awareness with Commerical Telescopes

As Earth orbits become more congested, contested, and competitive, the resources necessary to maintain a complete and accurate space picture continue to increase. This article proposes a notional augmentation to the Space Surveillance Network currently charged with this gaining and maintaining of space situational awareness (SSA). Mission requirements are derived using Air Force Space Command's enabling concepts document for SSA. The study uses a systems engineering approach to establish a system specification of the sensors to make up the network. The methodology tests sensor performance by collecting and processing angular observations of geostationary satellites to generate updated orbit estimations. Sensor metric accuracy is also verified. The corrected orbital elements and covariance estimates compare well with the Joint Space Operations Center's published two-line element sets (TLE) and typically reside within average geostationary TLE accuracy. The proposed Small Aperture Deep Space Surveillance (SADSS) network consists of 300 sensors placed at existing optical sensor locations. Estimated equipment cost is $20-25 million. SADSS could reduce Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance tasking by up to two hours per telescope per night. Aside from freeing up larger, more capable sensors for other purposes, the system offers persistent tracking for near-real-time event monitoring, a capability not currently provided by the Space Surveillance Network.

Read the full article here