SBIR-STTR Award

Space Situational Awareness (SSA) sensors are sensitive to timing and positioning errors that adversely affect the viability of collected data. Many erratic conditions contribute such as operating conditions, geometric constraints between sensors and sensed objects, and equipment degradation. SSA sensors' performance is assessed in a macro timescale long after processing has taken place. In addition, calibration satellites are commonly employed to assist in correcting gross system changes. These approaches are reactive and fail to address momentary or oscillating sensing errors and result in several data types that are either not optimized or "dropped on the floor"?. Stratagem will develop an approach that employs a proactive, near real-time sensor data conditioning process. Stratagem will analyze, and adopt the approach used by the commercially provided L3 ADS Global Optical Network for targeted AF Space Command mission use cases. Stratagem has teamed with L3 Applied Defense Solutions on Lumos to leverage their expertise on the L3 ADS Global Optical Network and its capabilities. Our team will demonstrate a proof-of-concept solution using a high-impact use case. Our solution will help normalize, calibrate, and "cleanse"? SSA data in near real-time as it comes from commercial and Space Surveillance Network sensors.

The Stratagem Team is partnering with the 1st Space Operations Squadron (1 SOPS) to provide a solution for real-time validation of collected Space Domain Awareness (SDA) metric observations. Traditionally, the measurement and assessment of 1 SOPS sensor data quality has been accomplished by external end-users, which can introduce latency in identifying and correcting sensor issues. Developing an autonomous method by which 1 SOPS can continuously monitor data quality will ensure the unit can meet tactical level requirements and timelines. This autonomous data validation capability also enables 1 SOPS to significantly expand their number of sensor sources without assuming additional risk of misinforming operations with erroneous data Stratagem's solution, Lumos, continuously monitors and validates all sensor data quality while proactively identifying calibration biases and alerting registered operators to the biases. Lumos will also generate a solution to correct the sensor bias, but it will not apply it without human intervention. The bias detection and corrections are performed by an existing algorithm approach that was developed and verified for both space-based SDA sensors and ground-based sensors. Lumos will be a fully containerized solution that will be deployed via Stratagem's DevSecOps pipeline and can be deployed into any virtualized environment.