Air Warfare, Space

AFRL Satellite To Track Up To The Moon; Space Force-NASA Tout Cooperation

on September 21, 2020 at 3:36 PM

DARPA’s DRACO nuclear-powered rocket for cislunar operations

WASHINGTON: The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is designing a pathfinder satellite to find and track objects in the vast area of cislunar space, as well as those orbiting the Moon, says Col. Eric Felt, head of AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate.

“Its mission will be to find fix and track attract objects that are out there near the Moon that might not otherwise be known, and just in general mature our confidence in being able to operate in that region since we don’t have a lot of satellites that have been up in that region before,” Felt explained.

The project comes as NASA and the Space Force are about to announce details of their collaboration surrounding NASA’s Artemis program to send astronauts back to the Moon by 2024. Space Force chief Gen. Jay Raymond and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine are speaking at the Mitchell Institute tomorrow about the effort, which will “include support for human spaceflight, emerging space transportation, standards and best practices for safe operations in space, scientific research, and planetary defense,” according to NASA’s press release.

In a presentation at the annual AMOS space situational awareness (SSA) conference on Friday, Felt called the region of space stretching between the the outer edges of Earth’s orbit to the outer edges of the Moon’s orbit (the most comprehensive definition of cislunar space) a “cone of shame” because the US has little ability to monitor space objects there.

“What we need to do is learn how we can keep track of those things because we have commercial operators and our peer competitors operating up there. So, we certainly need to maintain domain awareness,” he said.

AFRL’s Cislunar Highway Patrol System — or CHPS, pronounced ‘chips,’ and, yes, we at Breaking D are old enough to get the reference to the late 1970s TV series about buddy cops on motorbikes — will be a small satellite orbiting near the Moon, he said: “We then want CHPS to be able to tip and queue other assets, whether they be on the surface of the Earth or other assets in space, to make sure we can maintain custody of assets that are of high interest.”

Col. Eric Felt, AFRL (right); Col. Joe Roth, SMC (left) present AFRL’s new cislunar SSA project

Collaboration between NASA and the military on technologies related to space exploration is not new; cooperative efforts have taken place since the dawn of the Space Age. Indeed, a good proportion of astronauts have been active airmen — a recent example being Col. Nick Hague, who served as an engineer on the International Space Station and spent 203 days in space between March and October 2019.

And not to disappoint, but ‘planetary defense’ isn’t about protecting the Earth from the Death Star. It’s the term of art for finding, tracking and hopefully figuring out how to divert a strike by a large asteroid such as the one that scientists  wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era. NASA has had the job of cataloguing large near-Earth asteroids since 1998. The Space Force operates an assortment of radar and optical telescopes that, while aimed at keeping tabs on enemy satellites, also track asteroids coming close to the Earth. Bridenstine announced in a tweet in May that the new Space Force Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) being set up in Australia will carry a special NASA-designed asteroid tracking algorithm.

But, the Trump administration’s decision to make a big deal of the partnership plans on Artemis is yet another example of the heightened rhetoric around potential military operations in cislunar space. As Breaking D readers know, a number of Air Force and Space Force officials have been touting the need for the US military to keep an eye on possible nefarious activities in cislunar space by China in particular, as it expands its own lunar exploration activities.

So far, actual spending on such efforts has been small — aimed at early stage scientific experiments.

For example, as Breaking D readers know, DARPA has asked for $21 million in its 2021 budget for the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO), formerly known as “Reactor on a Rocket (ROAR),” up from an initial $10 million in 2020. DRACO “will develop and demonstrate a High-Assay LowEnriched Uranium (HALEU) nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system,” DARPA’s budget documents explain. NASA is working on similar nuclear thermal propulsion rockets, which use low-enriched — between 5 and 20 percent — uranium-235 (U-235).

DARPA’s budget documents call cislunar space the “new high-ground” that is “in danger of being defined by the adversary.” New propulsion systems are necessary for operations there because the region encompasses vast volumes of space that would take ages to traverse using current in-space engines, such as ion thrusters using solar powered batteries.

The Space Development Agency (SDA — not to be confused with Space Domain Awareness, sigh) also is keeping a beady eye on potential cislunar space monitoring as a potential mission set, despite dropping funding in April for its original concept of “advanced maneuvering vehicles” designed to serve as watchdogs.

Felt explained that there are a whole host of technical and operational challenges to be overcome before any routine cislunar operations — even for space domain awareness — can be made possible.

AFRL cislunar space timeline

“If you go out to the to the Moon, it’s a new, complex, vast regime. It’s hard to keep track of the orbital dynamics because it’s not just a matter matter of the Earth’s gravity, but you have to think about the Moon’s gravity and other effects that are determining the orbits that are out there,” he said.

“We are just getting started down this adventure and so we certainly need further discussion and we’re really throwing this out there as straw man to help get some of your ideas,” he told the AMOS audience, which skews toward technical experts in government, industry and academia.

Felt said that AFRL has a variety of baseline research efforts in mind, beginning with crafting new algorithms to “describe the orbits out there” because objects in the region face the “three body problem” where they are tugged at by gravity of both the Earth and Moon.

“There are a lot of technical challenges out there. We talked about how the three body effects and it’s chaotic. If you look at the orbits of the stuff that’s going around the Moon, it looks like a drunken sailor wandering around as compared to the orbits that we’re used to describing closer to the Earth,” he said.

Modeling and simulation will be used to look at gaps in current capabilities, primarily based on the ground, and what tools might be needed for operators to be able to “keep custody” of their spacecraft in the vast volumes of space in the region. Such tools will by necessity include autonomous systems for tracking and visualizing where near by objects are and their trajectories, Felt said, because ” there will be so much data ” to handle.

During his presentation at AMOS Felt ignored questions about the budgetary profile and planned duration of the CHPS effort. AFRL didn’t respond to an email query about the program’s value and scope by press time.

That said, Felt told reporters in a Sept. 16 roundtable on the margins of the annual Air Force Association winter meeting that CHPS may well be in the running as one of AFRL’s Vanguard programs, designed to speed technology over the infamous ‘valley of death’ and into a DoD program of record and the hands of operators. Air Force leaders will chose whether to tap any new programs, and if so which ones, as Vanguards in January, reports colleague Rachel Cohen.

Topics

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Exit mobile version