El Segundo, Calif. (AFNS) — From processing space-based knowledge sooner to enlisting industrial companions in new methods, this 12 months’s annual Battle Tonight competitors sponsored by House Methods Command elicited a powerful array of novel concepts designed to ship area functionality on the pace of want. Seven groups made the ultimate spherical and introduced their ideas to U.S. House Power and U.S. House Command leaders Oct. 7.
Winners shall be introduced Nov. 15, on the House Power Ball in Los Angeles.
House Methods Command’s annual Battle Tonight competitors debuted three years in the past searching for to empower options in alignment with the vital House Power mission of making certain a safe area area for all. The competitors is open to all SSC authorities staff and all concepts should have an operational sponsor from House Operations Command to validate that the proposal is operationally related. As much as $12 million is out there to fund the thought or concepts that win.
This 12 months, SSC requested individuals to give attention to the next areas: decreasing operator workload; enhancing area situational consciousness programs; enhancing the area widespread working image for ops facilities; helping operations in denied areas; and Monitoring, Telemetry and Command resiliency.
The groups introduced their entries to a panel of judges that included Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, SSC commander; Pleasure M. White, SSC govt director; Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, navy deputy to the assistant secretary of the Air Power, area acquisition and integration; Brig. Gen. Chandler Atwood, House Operations Command vice commander; and Col. Michelle Idle, SSC deputy commander.
Capt. McKenna Medina, Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Monitoring cell director from SSC’s House Sensing Program Workplace, kicked off the ultimate presentation session with a evaluate of her workforce’s proposal for a pre-mission planning instrument known as PRIMER, which stands for Precursor Refinement and Investigation Mapping for Exploration Suggestions. In response to Medina, PRIMER is designed to shortly analyze satellite tv for pc knowledge sooner to determine “sizzling spots” for additional investigation, getting tactical knowledge to the warfighter 33% sooner and cheaper.
The thought, she defined, developed from a TacSRT pilot launched 10 months in the past to companion with industrial distributors to ship tactical insights to warfighters inside 72 hours. The pilot delivered 268 operational planning merchandise to seven combatant instructions and 57 companion nations.
By incorporating current knowledge on the outset of a question response, PRIMER would “enable TacSRT operators to leverage and analyze free imagery knowledge and adapt industrial algorithms to offer historic context and set up baseline circumstances to scale back the scope and timelines for all future SRT queries,” Medina mentioned.
For instance, one pilot question concerned an space of 6,000 sq. kilometers. The industrial companion was capable of entry years of NASA nighttime knowledge, which allowed the TacSRT workforce to slim the sphere to simply six areas that deserved extra investigation, together with one area that wasn’t included within the unique request. This lowered the scope of the ask to 1,100 sq. kilometers, leading to sooner outcomes and an 82% price financial savings. In different circumstances, the fee financial savings has been as excessive as 99%.
As well as, “PRIMER will be capable of determine adversarial development and suspicious motion actions,” Medina mentioned. “It’s going to additionally be capable of monitor treaty violation, detect weapons testing and launch actions, and reply to pure disasters.”
Maj. Donovan Hutchins, Assured Entry to House Operations lead, introduced his workforce’s thought: Launch Logistics, Execution, And Programmatic System, an built-in launch scheduling functionality that centrally manages the complexity of launch knowledge administration, which entails monitoring a broad, various and dynamic knowledge set that features provide chain administration, altering launch schedules, instrumentation flip instances, launch safety, day of launch operations and extra.
In whole, Hutchins’ workforce recognized 732 knowledge sources from throughout the AATS enterprise that contribute to profitable launch operations and located that lots of that knowledge is siloed. LEAPS would remodel all of that siloed and dispersed knowledge into perception.
“That’s the final purpose,” Hutchins mentioned. “To supply perception to our leaders who’re making selections on the tactical stage, the operational stage and the strategic stage after which to offer situational consciousness for every little thing that’s occurring.”
In a joint presentation with Lt. Col. Brian Kester, Antenna Providers materiel chief, 2nd Lt. Devrin Chullanandana, Acquisition Insurance policies and Processes Division, House Sensing PMA motion officer, outlined Joint Antenna Market. Because the title implies, JAM would create a centralized market to attach government-owned and commercially owned antennas to House Power missions.
USSF operators are very involved in regards to the Satellite tv for pc Management Community having the ability to deal with the sheer variety of satellites it needs to launch and the tempo of knowledge that calls for in an period of Nice Energy Competitors, Chullanandana mentioned.
“Our present floor infrastructure that’s closely relied on by operators can’t deal with the sheer variety of missions we anticipate,” Chullanandana mentioned. “It received so dangerous in 2021 that there have been about 16,000 scheduling conflicts and operators (on the Guardian Subject Discussion board 2023) complained about getting ‘pushed off the lunch line’ and getting deprioritized.”
JAM could be an augmentation to the SCN, defined Kester. It will modify the prevailing scheduling software program to mixture all of the completely different schedules accessible from varied distributors and supply a method to take requests from the completely different satellite tv for pc operations facilities.
Representing the Air Power Analysis Laboratory, Apoorva Bhopale introduced House COP on SIPR for Joint and Allied companion use, a SIPRNet and allied model of the profitable JWICS SDCCS House Analytical-COP instrument.
House Protection Characterization and Management System is a mature Java software on JWICS that was constructed to offer close to real-time consciousness of area area/area COP, Bhopale mentioned. A key use of it was to point out which objects in orbit are co-orbital with others. SDCCS was Ops Accepted on the Nationwide House Protection Middle and is being sustained by SSC. It at the moment receives area catalog knowledge from SSC’s Warp Core knowledge internet hosting setting, Bhopale mentioned.
“It’s in each day, real-world use on the Pacific U.S. Fleet Forces Command and Navy, and the software program can be on the carriers USS Carl Vinson and USS Lincoln,” Bhopale mentioned. “They used it throughout their final operational deployment.”
“For a Battle Tonight scenario when it comes to impression, this funding merely expands a functionality that’s already in each day, actual world use at present,” Bhopale mentioned. “I do know the place to get the info sources, the primary supply code is finished, and the event pipeline and contracts are in place when it comes to innovation. It shortens the kill chain by promulgating SDA in any respect echelons from NSDC to Co-Comm and to tactical ranges like a provider or an Military division.”
Addressing the class of enhanced area situational consciousness, Capt. Trenton Harper, program supervisor with SSC’s House Area Consciousness program, introduced his workforce’s proposal for Tactical and Persistent Monitoring of GEO Targets by means of a Tremendous-Synchronous Small Satellite tv for pc Surveillance System (S6) using two current, free-flying satellites with optical payloads to arrange extra GEO monitoring.
There could come a time in 2026 when the united states’s SDA programs are overloaded, legacy programs are overloaded, and there are communications outages, but an operator wants knowledge urgently to assist wartime selections, mentioned Harper. With S6, operators may process sensors and use industrial cloud-based floor programs to quickly present vital info.
“S6 real-time tasking has automated knowledge processing and, with a quick downlink, can bypass legacy programs and supply the operator with a transparent image of the warfighting area and interact with protection programs to win the combat,” Harper mentioned.
The satellites have already been accomplished, Harper mentioned. If chosen, Battle Tonight funding would supply built-in and coordinated rehearsals with House Operations Command to execute S6’s timing queue capabilities with automated processing; present extra software program growth; allow check rehearsals, and drive down the latency for knowledge availability.
“By leveraging industrial options like ground-based cloud processing and industrial antenna networks, we are able to add resiliency to our (Telemetry, Monitoring and Community Management) commit programs,” Harper mentioned. “This ensures that even when our conventional belongings are overwhelmed or attacked, we preserve management and visibility in area.”
“As well as, we’re decreasing operator workloads through the use of autonomous knowledge processing and close to real-time machine-assisted tasking to ship actionable intelligence to the warfighter sooner than ever,” Harper mentioned.
Capt. Trenton Harper, program supervisor with SSC’s House Area Consciousness program workplace, introduced his workforce’s proposal for a House Knowledge Community Overlay Framework, which might allow capability to offer speedy connectivity from the continental United States throughout multi-orbital SATCOM networks to the tactical edge.
Within the occasion of battle involving INDOPACOM “our Navy shall be combating to get to the AOR over hundreds of miles of open water,” Johnson mentioned. As soon as there, Johnson says they’re going to require networks that join effectively with one another from East to West.
Whereas the long run House Knowledge Community is designed to assist alleviate edge-to-edge problem, Johnson confused that warfighters want capabilities at present and definitely earlier than 2026. The proposed overlay community would cut back communication planning time to second.
“Customers would entry the overlay community with a small gadget which is appropriate with their current {hardware} and that gives entry to primarily managed community,” Johnson mentioned.
Representing SSC’s House Area Consciousness TAP Lab, Maj. Sean Allen introduced Dungeons and Dragons: Countering House-Area Camouflage, Concealment, and Deception, a functionality to quickly course of knowledge searching for “tripwire” anomalies that might be indicators of camouflaged area objects.
“House just isn’t completely different from different domains in lots of regards,” Allen mentioned. “If we need to defend and defend our programs, we have to counter camouflage, concealment and deception.”
“Nevertheless, it’s not nearly defending and defending our on-orbit belongings,” Allen mentioned. “Profitable a joint and even multi-domain combat requires that we determine adversary area drive enhancement programs, which can embrace signature-managed or clandestine payloads that would function vital comm nodes which we must be contemplating in our planning. You possibly can’t plan to mitigate or negate a node should you don’t know that it exists.”
Even way back to 1963, the U.S. was involved in regards to the potential for adversaries to make use of satellite tv for pc signature discount. Right now, comparable measures are utilized by some industrial distributors, together with SpaceX, which has applied some optical signature discount applied sciences previously few years as a result of astronomers complained that unique satellite tv for pc buses have been “too vivid,” Allen mentioned.
“There’s loads of current knowledge and sensors that may be delivered to bear in a software program pipeline to seek out particular ‘tripwire’ anomalies,” Allen mentioned. Dungeons and Dragons will “go get any and all knowledge and have a systemic and rigorous method to check for proof of camouflage, concealment, deception, after which mixture the info and do sensor command and management tip and queue to keep up observe custody of these objects and feed into different current programs.”
That is in observe at present on the unclassified stage, however Dungeons and Dragons would take it to increased categorized ranges and automate the method, Allen mentioned.
“It’s semi-manual even on this present rudimentary kind, however Dungeons and Dragons has already discovered week over week someplace within the north of 600 objects which are actual,” Allen mentioned. “They’re not within the public catalog and we really feel they don’t seem to be of U.S. origin, they usually exhibit a point of camouflage, concealment, deception.”
Rachel Souder-Arguedas, director of Atlas X, which organized the competitors, thanked the finalists on the finish of the displays, and famous that a part of the aim of the competitors “was to make it possible for all staff right here really feel like they’ve a voice, a method to take part and share their concepts.”
“So, whether or not or not you obtain funding, there’s positively worth in sharing these concepts,” Souder-Arguedas mentioned. “And I do know by the truth that we have been capable of get a pair hours of time from these senior leaders right here that they actually worth your ideas and insights and views as effectively.”