The Omitron Military Division was recently awarded a Phase-II Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant from the United States Air Force (USAF).  Continuation of this effort into Phase-II will push this critical technology closer to implementation and deployment.  Omitron is pleased to be able to support the USAF mission through this SBIR and our other current contracts.

Technical challenge:

Currently, the Space Surveillance Network (SSN) and select space-based Space Situation Awareness (SSA) assets are the only sources validated and routinely calibrated for use in maintaining the high accuracy space catalog and in the performance of associated mission areas. The process used for sensor calibration, in its current instantiation, is operator-intensive, error prone and not timely. Additionally, this service is not easily shared across stakeholders, thus limiting use of sensor data from the DoD, Intelligence Community (IC), civil agencies, and commercial entities. Commercial sensing assets are currently utilized and will begin to contribute more and more to the Air Force SSA mission.   Below are examples of errors associated with elevation and time of day. 

Proposed solution:

In order to keep pace with the increased demand, the sensor calibration process must be re-evaluated and optimized. This effort aims to research and implement workflow automation services, autoregressive machine learning models, refined statistical models based on known physical properties and pipelines to support publishing data products to the wider community of stakeholders.

Potential benefits:

Automation, continual monitoring, and rapid data product generation will have immediate and long lasting positive impacts in the areas of satellite custody maintenance, conjunction assessment, proximity operations, early indication and warning of events, threat detection and assessment as well as sensor anomaly identification and performance monitoring.