The space between the Earth and the Moon is going to become extremely crowded over the next 10 years. With NASA's planned missions in the Artemis program and other countries participating in the space race in this region, there is great interest in observing, tracking and predicting the trajectories of objects such as asteroids and satellites to avoid collisions with spacecraft.
The space between the Earth and the Moon is going to become extremely crowded during the next 10 years. With NASA's planned missions in the Artemis program and other countries participating in the space race in this region, there is great interest in observing, tracking and predicting the trajectories of objects such as asteroids and satellites to avoid collisions with spacecraft.
But the process of observations and identification of objects in space (SDA), faces challenges due to the vast space between the Earth and the Moon.
"The space between the Earth and the Moon is vast," says Tarek Alghohari, associate professor of aeronautical engineering. "The current SDA infrastructure, which is mostly located on Earth, is not equipped to provide the required coverage in this space. Fast and accurate solutions are needed to quantify the uncertainty to improve forecasts and provide SDA information in the absence of continuous coverage."
Algohary and his team will develop these solutions with the support of a $350,000 grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research's Data Processing and Dynamics Program. They will create a computational framework that will quickly and accurately track objects in space in real time, on spacecraft or satellites such as the Oracle of the US Air Force Research Laboratory, which is designed to increase SDA capabilities in the space between the Earth and the Moon. The algorithms will allow -Oracle and other spacecraft to operate autonomously without intervention from Earth.
The same algorithms can also affect the maritime domain (MDA). Just as spacecraft need to detect space debris or track a satellite's orbit, vessels need to detect other vessels, predict target trajectories, and detect suspicious behavior in real time.
"The domains of space and sea are similar in terms of the lack of continuous coverage of spacecraft or vessels, the size of the domain to search and the need to be able to predict maneuvers," says Algohari. Increasing maritime domain coverage may require shorter timeframes; However, with the expansion of space missions, the space coverage operations were shortened from weeks and days to hours and minutes."
Algohari will use his expertise in the space field to develop a computational framework similar to the one that exists in the marine field. The algorithms developed to quantify the uncertainty will advance the maritime domain and allow vessels to identify objects in real time and predict their future location.
This research is funded by a $150,000 grant from Lockheed Martin.
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