BackSweep: Seeing Anomalous Events In Context

ABSTRACT: A nightmare scenario for the U.S. Air Force is where multiple satellites suddenly stop communicating without warning, indicating a possible hostile anti-satellite campaign on the nation"s space assets. In order to mitigate this significant national risk, the Air Force Space Command is leading efforts to improve space situational awareness and early determination of space threats. To address space operations capability gaps, Modus Operandi"s objective is the development of BackSweep, an innovative, net-centric architecture and prototype tool for automating the retrieval of relevant contextual information related to anomalous space-related events, helping warfighters understand the potential causes and impacts of these events. BackSweep will use semantic technologies and probabilistic models to formally represent and reason over the environmental, mission and system contexts of space assets. BackSweep"s advanced contextual reasoning capability will significantly reduce an analyst"s workload, enhance his space situational awareness, and improve his threat assessment effectiveness. BENEFIT: Benefits of BackSweep include: 1) quick identification and retrieval of information pertaining to anomalous space events for operators and analysts; 2) automated analysis of the potential causes of the anomaly and ranks them by likelihood, allowing the operator/analyst to focus on the most likely causes first; and 3) presentation of the results of the analysis in existing collaborative tools and a more powerful analysis tool that lets the user drill down into the contextual data. Potential commercialization opportunities exist in other all-source intelligence analysis programs of record, such as the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) family of systems, and in the private satellite market.