Testbed to Evaluate New Approaches for STM

Under Space Policy Directive Three, the Department of Commerce (DOC) has taken on leadership of STM. With increasing activities in commercial space, it will be necessary for the DOC to continue to drive technology developments to improve upon legacy DOD approaches. We believe that this is most effectively done using a testbed approach, one that is vertically-integrated and transdisciplinary to ensure that new contributions are recognized, peer-reviewed, and make their way into operations in a transparent fashion from research to operations.

Accurate, actionable SSA information is required to realize the projected one trillion-dollar space economy. Decentralized control architectures, improved STM data sharing, innovations in track location and Keplerian orbital estimates and the use of contextual information for conjunction assessment and course-of-action development will contribute to the growth of commercial space. New efforts in R&D must include astrodynamics, advanced sensors, intelligent systems, etc., and to study and test new approaches to clearly and substantively improve the accuracy and precision associated with orbital ephemerides and covariance realism of these space objects. It is important to take advantage of the research power of universities to grow the nations SSA capabilities while creating an STM enterprise in which information providers and consumers may interact to enable further commercialization. A self-sustaining collaboration between government, university and industry which shares necessary information to preserve safe operations on-orbit, while simultaneously protecting intellectual property is needed.

MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit operating seven separate Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC) for US Government sponsors, including the Department of Defense, and the Department of Commerce, has partnered with USRA, a well-established international university association, to pilot just such a program. USRA and MITRE developed a process in which: 1) important issues/topics to enable SSA were identified; 2) a call for proposals was used to convened team of SMEs / researchers to discuss approaches to address the issues; 3) software/algorithms were protoypted and used to quantify the ability to address the conjunction assessment operational needs; and 4) the 'best' approaches were identified and documented - hosted on the testbed itself for use by others. The partnership is well suited to perform the bridging efforts required to bring together disparate audiences with varying ideas on intellectual property, publication rights and commercialization.

This paper describes a summer pilot funded by USRA, MITRE and DOC. The pilot leverages an open source space data repository framework developed for the USAF called Unified Data Library (UDL), and is focused on reducing the time required to do object launch window calculations, over a limited volume in space, with high accuracy, by teaming STM researchers from Purdue and University of Arizona with MITRE UDL systems engineers. We will report on the process, challenge areas, next steps and research results.