Spacecraft Autonomy through Local Situational Awareness (SALSA)

The proposed Spacecraft Autonomy through Local Situational Awareness (SALSA) program enables a spacecraft to autonomously estimate a proximal space object’s intent and explores the implications of intent estimation for on-board autonomous decision-making. The SBIR Phase I effort will include (1) definition of Space Force reference missions to guide technology development, (2) a literature review and technology survey on approaches to behavior classification and their application to space domain awareness (SDA), (3) prototyping of probabilistic intent estimation algorithms based on polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) and frequentist inference, (4) simulations exercising the prototype solution against selected reference mission scenarios, and (5) technical analysis and recommendations for follow-on Phase II research. The intended product of a follow-on SBIR Phase II program will be C++ software compatible with implementation on a near-term space flight experiment to demonstrate advanced on-board intent estimation and autonomous decision-making in response to one or multiple space objects of unknown origin.