SATCAST-Space Awareness Toolkit for Calculating Anomalies to Satellite Tasking

As the single locus of control for all space operations, the Commander of the Joint Functional Component Command Space (CDR JFCC Space) must marshal data that are disparate, distributed, and dynamic, and which even under optimal conditions compose a mosaic of uncertainty. Despite great advances in monitoring and modeling, the space environment still presents many challenges in forecasting and uncertainty reduction (Bother & Daglis, 2007). Current tools boast limited integrative capability placing enormous demands on human operators to perform mental fusion of the data elements to derive actionable information.  Exacerbating the problem is the distributed nature of the data.  To address this problem, military operations are transitioning from a platform-centric approach to a network-centric architecture. Aptima is proposing an intelligent, agent-based solution to provide users tasking and workflow information to optimize processes supporting Space Situational Awareness (SSA).   BENEFIT: Space Awareness Toolkit for Calculating Anomalies to Satellite Tasking (SATCAST) seizes the opportunity to offer innovative solutions to the difficulties of leveraging network-centric operations and managing distributed data for space situation awareness (SSA).  Given the imposed structure of workflow, Aptima will leverage intelligent agents and human-centered design capable of supporting a range of human operators and their preferred workflows. SATCAST will provide needed insight as to the nature of the data required to for operators to complete tasks and comprehension of the status of the workflow for completion of their current task list.  It is not sufficient for operators to know what piece of data they need to reach a goal state (and obtain those data hoping someone returns a phone call or email), they must have a tool that knows about their needs and can anticipate and fulfill their goal-directed objectives. Therefore, SATCASTs visualization solutions will offer visual displays not only representing the environmental effects phenomena, but also the work processes needed to build SSA.