Distributed Satellite Resource Management for Space Superiority

Distributed satellite resource management promises improved access to mission-critical satellite information. A satellite mission re-planning system is needed to utilize predicted system outages and re-plan to meet the ongoing spaceborne asset missions. The DF&NN team will acquire or generate set of historical Communication/Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) data. NG IT/TASC will acquire historical GPS mission planning information and identify GPS mission planning system constraints to drive the prototype mission re-planning system research. An analysis of alternative mission re-planning techniques with emphasis on GPS re-planning will be performed based upon the Dual Node Network Data Fusion & Resource Management technical architecture. NG IT/TASC Multi-Intelligence Information Tool (MIST) software will be modified to provide a testbed for the evaluation of satellite mission re-planning prototypes initially driven by C/NOFS degradation predictions.  The resulting GPS mission re-planning software will be provided as a service for integration and orchestration with other Situational Awareness Fusion Integrated Research Environment (SAFIRE) capabilities. The MIST-based mission re-planning testbed will be applied to evaluate the improvement in GPS mission effectiveness with and without C/NOFS for manual versus automated/assisted mission re-planning. Performance measures will be defined to include probability of GPS mission success, timeliness, and cost measures of performance (MOPs). BENEFIT: This automated mission re-planning decision support system has not only military applications, but is also relevant to the intelligence community, commercial, and civil space borne assets. As an example the GPS system is of vital importance to DOD and IC communities, and is used for civil applications (e.g. NASA, Code M Space Shuttle Operations, Code Y Earth Sciences), as well as commercial production (e.g. geo-rectified imagery from Digital Globe, and GeoEye). Given this, there are clear parallels where the satellite mission re-planning system could be extended in the civil/commercial communities.  The improved C/NOFS and SAS BFS driven products from this SBIR will be extendable for mission re-planning in other commercial or government systems for which C/NOFS and/or BFS data will be available. Homeland security and commercial system operations have interest in computer security abnormality detection, recognition, and tracking. In fact, the operators of any system that outputs SOH data should be interested in these affordable capabilities for mission re-planning response. Commercial and military satellite operators should be interested in having these re-planning decision aids applied to their satellites as force multipliers. In addition, the distributed data fusion, MIST/SAFIRE testbed, and abnormality data mining products will be directly extendable to these commercial and government applications. The NG IT/TASC team member has capabilities in these commercial applications and will support this commercialization strategy. The first planned product is licensed software for automated satellite mission re-planning decision aids. These tools will reduce the workload necessary for prompt responses needed to meet warfighter support requirements. All other tools currently on the market are manually intensive.  The analysis of alternatives in this effort will compare our approach with the currently available tools.  The primary market for the integrated mission manager is military (and intelligence) space.  These entities are explicitly involved in the SSA and DCS missions so can directly benefit from deploying the dual-node network mission manager on any or all deployed satellites.  The successful demonstration of the mission manager as part of a flight system in Phase 3 would open up this market.