Award

As space continues to become more congested and contested, our ability to identify and mitigate man-made and natural threats to space assets becomes increasingly difficult.While the number of man-made objects being put into space each year increases, the intelligence community (IC), Department of Defense (DoD), US and International commercial companies are accelerating their monitoring capabilities and the amount of data being processed is expanding at an accelerating rate.Current capabilities enable us to generate initial tracks and preliminary orbit estimations in a matter of hours, however performing an in-depth characterization can take weeks to months, especially if the object is not cooperative.Technologies which leverage multi-INT data and provide for rapid correlation of available information for complete object characterization, including ability to assign attribution to hostile activity, is a necessity for improving U.S. SSA.It affords the U.S. the ability to take defensive action, reduces U.S. asset vulnerability and acts as a deterrent to those adversaries who may consider interfering with U.S. satellites. To address this problem, ExoAnalytic Solutions and SRI International propose Multi-int Automated Satellite Characterization (MASC), an innovative technology that will enable rapid space object correlation from the fusion of multiple data sources.