Abstract:
The advent of commercial space situational awareness (SSA) data and services represents an exciting development in space traffic coordination. The proliferation of accurate, globally proliferated space tracking radars and optical wide field-of-view searching sensors, both optimized for the low Earth orbit (LEO) regime, promises a wealth of additional SSA data. Similarly, the availability of enterprise-level orbit determination (OD) solutions, that can manage the maintenance of an entire space catalog and its attendant functions (e.g., maneuver detection and recovery), and the combination of existing LEO capabilities, provide the opportunity to explore the potential for the maintenance of commercial satellite catalog. Because improved orbital safety is a broad mandate, and furthermore the public-private partnership envisioned by SPD-3 is a new paradigm for the space safety community, a number of different pathfinder efforts - completed, in process, and planned - have been selected in order to determine the desirable parameters of the public-private partnership; buy down technical risk; and understand contractual, legal, and cooperation challenges to this method of obtaining SSA data and services. As the Office of Space Commerce advances the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), it is mindful of the direction to leverage commercial data and services. The TraCSS capabilities in Phase 1 will include the purchase of commercial products to improve the solutions for conjunctions. To explore how the Office will procure, measure, integrate, and budget for the desired commercial SSA data and services, a short-term pathfinder activity with industry has been undertaken. The “Consolidated Pathfinder”, announced earlier this year in January, exercised many of the capabilities planned for TraCSS, including obtaining additional data on secondary objects of conjunctions of interest, an orbit determination of those objects, data quality and integrity monitoring of the process, and insertion of the updated data into the conjunction screening process. In addition, the Consolidated Pathfinder provided an opportunity to explore the ability of the commercial sector to maintain a catalog focused on the LEO regime using commercial resources alone. Three industrial providers were selected: LeoLabs, which provided LEO radar tracking; Slingshot Aerospace, which provided LEO optical search and tracking; and the COMSPOC Corporation, which provided enterprise catalog maintenance. Two data quality monitoring vendors, SpaceNav and Kayhan Space, were also selected to evaluate the data and products. A two-month preparation period ran from February 1 to March 31, 2024. The pathfinder live data collection took place from April 1 to June 30, 2024, and a post-pathfinder analytical period is still ongoing, but mainly completed in August 2024. The paper will both describe the pathfinder activity and report on the interim results of the principal objectives, related to establishing metrics, understanding price and acquisition methodology, and the secondary objective of catalog maintenance.
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Magnus, S., Hejduk, M., Johnson, J., Giles, J., Parikka, A., Joseph, C., Coursey, C., Lifson, M., Antunes de Sa, A.L., Baker, D., Duncan, M., Grey, C., Hall, R., Johnson, S., Mesalles-Ripoll, P., Oltrogge, D.L., Stauch, J., and Strobel, D., “The TraCSS Consolidated Pathfinder: Leveraging Commercial Capability in LEO,” AMOS SSA Conference, Maui, HI USA 18 Sep 2024.
