Future Outlook

The Laboratory’s Space Control focus in the upcoming year includes the following:

staff in MEL The low-power HUSIR transmitter uses a gyroTWT tube (shown above) that covers 8 GHz bandwidth and procduces 1,000 watts peak power.
  • Development of the Haystack Ultrawideband Satellite Imaging Radar (HUSIR) and Space Surveillance Telescope sensor systems, which will bring new capability to the Space Control mission area. Information from these new sensors will be integrated with the Extended Space Sensor Architecture test bed
  • Continued work in advanced radar development, radar surveillance, space-object identification, electro-optical deep-space surveillance, collaborative sensing, and sensor fusion and processing
  • Pursuit of new initiatives in the Space Control area, including the next generation of sensor systems and downstream processing/information extraction systems, such as
    • A small-aperture, space-based, space-surveillance system to provide wide-area search of the geosynchronous belt
    • A passive, ground-based, wide-angle “fence” search system for detecting low Earth-orbiting satellites, utilizing unique curved charge-coupled device focal planes to achieve the wide coverage
    • Net-centric machine-aided decision-support algorithms to allow the operators in the Joint Space Operations Center to react to short-timeline, emerging threats to space assets

 

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