Multi-Intel for Space Situation Awareness (MInt4SSA)

Space-based assets’ prominent role in ISR, navigation, communications, and targeting exposes a critical vulnerability for US military operations. To maintain our military dominance, the US Air Force is pursuing Space Situation Awareness (SSA) and Defensive Counterspace (DCS) techniques that identify and characterize space-infrastructure attacks and the associated estimation and prediction of adversary intent and capabilities. For example, AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate is applying data fusion theory to automated threat detection and characterization in the SAFIRE program. As part of this team, Charles River Analytics is developing a situation assessment data fusion component that identifies relationships and situation state across space abnormality event tracks. However, SAFIRE currently cannot infer the intent behind identified anomalies. We propose to extend SAFIRE’s fusion engine with a Multi-Int System for Space Situation Awareness (MInt4SSA) that can infer intent through additional types of intelligence information. MInt4SSA demonstrates methods to extract relevant information from new intelligence data sources and to extend our existing Level 2 fusion components to use this information to improve SSA. For Phase II, we propose to develop additional components to include reasoning capabilities and a standalone capability to provide a context-handling service to other fusion processes. BENEFIT: We see direct application of the proposed effort to the development of decision aiding systems to enhance SSA and support counterspace operations. In addition, the proposed effort will impact the development and enhancement of our Connect™ network modeling and analysis tool via the incorporation of the situation-theoretic modeling and inferencing components of the proposed system.