SBIR-STTR Award

he Air Force has a common problem across its Space C2 Enterprise; operators are often over burdened with trivial tasks and lack appropriate solutions to address mission objectives, feasibly in near real-time. The Phase I investigation will evaluate a solution that alleviates the sensor optimization and calibration problem. This issue affects the Air Force in multiple ways: 1) difficulty in validating, calibrating and using all the new sources of data, 2) manpower constraints to keep up with the workload, 3) mission degradation of the space protection and SSA mission areas due to data starvation due a lack of integration. The focus will be on the sensor optimization mission at 18th space and Space Defense mission at the NSDC. Future efforts would expand upon this use case to provide similar solutions to other DoD, civil and commercial organizations. Omitron proposes an automatic, near real time sensor calibration capability that provides services to commercial, DoD, foreign and IC users. Omitron's Dr. Dan Snow offers expert level experience in the integration of sensors into various space and intelligence mission areas. Omitron has the mission domain expertise, coupled with direct mission support with key stakeholders at the CSpOC, NROC, NSDC, GSFC, and JSFC.

Currently, the Space Surveillance Network (SSN) and select space-based Space Situation Awareness (SSA) assets are the only sources validated and routinely calibrated for use in maintaining the high accuracy space catalog and in the performance of associated mission areas. The process used for sensor calibration, in its current instantiation, is operator-intensive, error prone and not timely. Additionally, this service is not easily shared across stakeholders thus limiting use of sensor data from the DoD, Intelligence Community (IC), civil agencies, and commercial entities. Commercial sensing assets are currently and will begin to contribute more and more to the Air Force SSA mission, in order to keep pace with the increased demand the sensor calibration process must re-evaluated and optimized. This effort aims to research and implement workflow automation services, autoregressive machine learning models, refined statistical models based on known physical properties and pipelines to support publishing of data products to the wider community of stakeholders. Automation, continual monitoring, and rapid data product generation will have immediate and long lasting positive impacts in the areas of satellite custody maintenance, conjunction assessment, proximity operations, early indication and warning of events, threat detection and assessment as well as sensor anomaly identification and performance monitoring.