Data Mining Development for OCS/DCS SSA Operations

Numerica proposes to develop a prototype system for co-orbital anti-satellite (ASAT) threat assessment, intended ultimately to be integrated into a larger data mining / data fusion Space Situation Awareness (SSA) environment. This system will mine the available satellite kinematic track data for indications of potential co-orbital threats, analyze the ability of the potential threat to reach and destroy targets of interest, and combine the result with prior information on the likelihoods of various targets, producing probabilities of damage to each of the targets. The threat assessments will be displayed graphically as a decision aid for a human operator, though the results can also be forwarded directly to other systems in the SSA environment for automatic planning of defensive action. BENEFIT: Numerica''s proposed co-orbital threat assessment system will provide a key component to Defensive Counter-Space (DCS) SSA operations, working autonomously to alert an operator or planning agent of an impending threat to valuable resources from other satellites already in orbit. The risk of such attacks is growing as space-based systems play an increasingly critical role in U.S. civilian life and national defense, and as the proliferation of microsatellite technology makes vehicles capable of co-orbital ASAT easier to deploy and harder to detect. The same threat assessment system can be triggered in the event of a collision or other event that produces new objects in space, to determine which assets may need to be repositioned to avoid the debris field. Beyond these SSA applications, the reachability analysis at the heart of this system can be applied to problems concerning robustness or safety analysis of nonlinear systems such as aircraft conflict detection and avoidance, or safety-critical nuclear or chemical processes. Reachable sets can also be employed in time-optimal control problems with bounded uncertainties, such as routing of autonomous vehicles for pursuit of enemy targets.