Program Overview

Lincoln Laboratory detects, tracks, and identifies man-made satellites; accomplishes satellite mission and payload assessment; and investigates technology to improve monitoring of the space environment, including space weather and atmospheric and ionospheric effects. The technology focuses are the application of new components and algorithms to enable sensors with greatly enhanced capabilities and the development of network-centric processing systems for the nation’s Space Surveillance Network.

Space Surveillance

Space Situational Awareness CenterLexington Space Situational Awareness Center demonstrates near-real-time decision support for space surveillance operations.

Among the highly capable space surveillance systems operated by Lincoln is the Lincoln Space Surveillance Complex (LSSC) in Westford, MA. The complex constitutes the foundation of the Laboratory’s ground-based radar space surveillance programs, and is composed of three high-power radars: Haystack Imaging Radar operating at X-band, Haystack Auxiliary Radar operating at Ku-band, and Millstone Hill Tracking Radar operating at L-band. The Millstone Hill Tracking Radar and the Space-Based Visible sensor designed and integrated at Lincoln, provides space situational awareness data to support more than 50 new launches each year.

A multistatic radar test bed consisting of the Haystack and Haystack Auxiliary illumination radars, three fixed received sites, and one transportable receive site recently began operations. The test bed was used to demonstrate wideband bistatic tracking and interferometric three-dimensional inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging of satellites in low Earth orbits. The Haystack Ultrawideband Satellite Imaging Radar (HUSIR) under development for installation at the LSSC will improve the ground-based inverse synthetic aperture radar resolution by an order of magnitude, thus enabling a significant increase in collection activities.

Progress in providing space situational awareness and astronomical synoptic search applications is enabled through the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST), a sensor that combines innovative curved charge-coupled device imager technology developed at Lincoln Laboratory with a very wide field-of-view, large-aperture telescope. The SST will possess advanced ground-based optical system capability for detection and tracking of objects in space.

Another asset to the space control mission is the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep-Space Surveillance (GEODSS) system in Socorro, New Mexico. The GEODSS system supports wide-ranging, electro-optical surveillance. A spin-off NASA program, Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, is using the GEODSS system to discover near-Earth asteroids; more than 50% of the known asteroids in our solar system have been discovered through this program.

Net-Centric Capabilities

The Laboratory’s vehicle for bringing space situational awareness into the net-centric realm is the Extended Space Sensor Architecture (ESSA). This network-centric test bed leverages proven technologies, including sensor sidecars, web-based technologies such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language) or WSDL (Web Services Description Language), and net-centric services. Under ESSA, space surveillance sensors will be made net-centric, and information exploitation engines will be developed to feed off databases and sensors. As a result, operators will have access to a broad variety of real-time information that will enable a responsive decision-making process. The first ESSA deliveries into the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) have already provided the capability for real-time images from the Laboratory’s Haystack Auxiliary sensor to JSpOC operators.

 

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