Space domain awareness

So they released a white paper that detailed how they were able to use their RF sensing satellites that are deployed with the intention of doing RF sensing for the ground, but using them to track satellites.

So this is space domain awareness, but they're using radio frequency signal detection rather than using images, which is what everybody's doing right now.

This is notable for a few reasons.

One is that these satellites were not originally intended to do space domain awareness.

Uh, it reminds me a lot of Vantor, how they deployed WorldView to do Earth imaging, but they were able to repurpose it for space-to-space imaging, and they were doing that before this was a demand, and now they're, they're seeing the fruits of that effort.

HawkEye, much the same way.

There's a lot of noise from all these satellites talking and from the Earth talking that you have to pick out, and so having that signal processing capability is pretty advanced, and then being able to use that to actually find a location and keep track of it as it's moving really fast is a really tricky problem to solve, and it's probably why it took them two years to do it.

They did it on a pretty shoestring budget, $1.2 million, so it really was like a research project.

And essentially, what does this mean? Um, it means that if you're building a satellite that might cost you hundreds of millions to get like a very big telescope on it, you can now use a camera and a satellite that might cost you a couple million and effectively reach the same resolution, um, by saving hundreds of millions of dollars by just using this camera with a small lens.

So that is very useful for obviously, uh, when you're looking up into space, so astronomy, space domain awareness.

If you're looking for objects in, uh, LEO or in, sorry, low Earth orbit or in GEO, um, then you would need to have, um, you want to classify them and not just pick up a little signal like with radar, then you would wanna have a high resolution camera to do that.

Um, it's also useful if you're looking down.

So when you're doing, um, reconnaissance missions, for example, or Earth observation in general, then you would want to have obviously a high resolution imaging, um, that improves, um, what you can actually detect with a small satellite or even with a large satellite seeing even smaller things from, uh, LEO.

Um, now in the air, this is not just interesting for space.

Today, we have the focus on space domain awareness, looking up, uh, basically from the ground and space-based space domain awareness.

Um, but in the future, obviously it's a camera.

Maybe you can explain the question after I ask it and answer it so people can get a sense of what I'm talking about.

Is Benchmark Space responsible for changing the name Space Situational Awareness to Space Domain Awareness?

I don't think so.

I haven't heard that.

carrot in our cap, I guess.

Yeah, we would call it SSA, Space Situational Awareness, for so long where you're just kind of aware of things that are around you and floating near satellites, whether it's debris or other satellites.

And now it's Space Domain Awareness.

And you have to just have control of your domain zone.

It's a really great question.

And it comes down to the severe limitations of what military experts call Space Situational Awareness, or SSA.

Okay, explain that.

Yes.

It can also reduce latency in data reception and facilitate data distribution.

Furthermore, integrating them with other systems could contribute to Space Situational Awareness, or SSA, and expand capabilities for tracking space objects.

Recently, U.S. Secretary of the Air Force, Troy Monk, confirmed that the United States has space control weapons deployed in space.

This is an example of the trend toward the militarization of space, an area in which China and Russia have also demonstrated capabilities.