BackSweep: Seeing Anomalous Events In Context

ABSTRACT: A nightmare scenario for the U.S. Air Force would be if multiple satellites used by the Pentagon suddenly stopped communicating without warning, indicating a possible hostile anti-satellite (ASAT) campaign on the nation"s space assets. The Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) is leading efforts to improve space situational awareness (SSA) and early determination of space threats within the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) Mission System (JMS). To support JMS capability gaps, Modus Operandi proposes the development of BackSweep, an innovative, net-centric architecture and prototype tool for automating the retrieval of contextual information related to anomalous space-related events; helping warfighters understand the potential causes and impacts of these events. BackSweep uses 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 intelligence analyst"s workload, enhance his space situational awareness, and improve his threat assessment effectiveness within the JMS. BENEFIT: The anticipated benefits of the BackSweep approach for the JSpOC Mission System are to: 1) significantly reduces manual processing of military intelligence; 2) provides reasoning over anomalous events to quickly determine threats to space assets; and 3) increases levels of fusion of data from multiple information sources. Significant potential commercial opportunities are available in the area of pervasive or ubiquitous computing including personal electronic devices such as cell phones and personal digital assistants. These devices are made much more useful when they are aware of the user's context.