Event Detection from RF Sensing
RF monitoring is currently underutilized in today’s Space Situational Awareness architectures. Providing RF situational awareness is critical to protecting C2 and mission data satellite links. According to Air Force Doctrine, SSA includes components of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), space environmental monitoring, and space warning functions. Monitoring of the local RF environment near a ground…
Recent Events and Highlights in GEO SSA
The rate at which space traffic density has increased has seen much acceleration in recent years. It is expected for this trend to continue as various contributors to the commercial space market plan constellations that are orders of magnitude larger than has been flown to date. Commercial companies, such as ExoAnalytic Solutions, have deployed ground…
Responsive SSA – Responding to New Space and Old Problems
The space environment is becoming complicated by the layering of new space system architectures and a diversity of new spacefaring entities layered on top of the existing derelict debris population. This dynamic situation will require more responsive space situational awareness (SSA) capabilities to efficiently respond to the changing nature of space operations without looking past…
NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA HQ
NASA and its partners maintain a watch for Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), asteroids and comets that pass within Earth’s vicinity, as part of an ongoing effort to discover, catalog, and characterize these bodies and to determine if any pose an impact threat. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) is responsible for: • Ensuring the early detection…
Wavefront Sensing and Control of the James Webb Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a segmented deployable telescope, utilizing 6 degrees of freedom for adjustment of the Secondary Mirror (SM) and 7 degrees of freedom for adjustment of each of its 18 segments in the Primary Mirror (PM). When initially deployed, the optical elements will be positioned to within a few mm…
Advanced Lightweight Mirrors for Space-Based Missions
There are many current and future space-based optical systems that are leveraging large aperture or segmented aperture primary mirrors. The growth in the aperture size is driving demand for new approaches to produce large aperture, space-based optical components and/or mirror segments that are more affordable and with faster manufacturing lead times than traditional optical components…
An Operational Update on GOES-16 and Post-Launch Status of GOES-17
NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) are a mainstay of weather forecasts and environmental monitoring in the United States. The next generation of GOES satellites, known as the GOES-R Series, represents significant advancements in the near real-time observation of severe weather across the Western Hemisphere. The GOES-R satellite, the first in the series that also…
Advanced Observatory Design for the Imaging X-Ray Polarimeter Explorer (IXPE) Mission
Scientist and astronomer’s worldwide have a great interest in exploring the hidden details of some of the most extreme and exotic astronomical objects, such as stellar and supermassive black holes, neutron stars and pulsars. However, one cannot directly image what’s going on near objects like black holes and neutron stars, but studying the polarization of…
Methodology and Results of James Webb Space Telescope Thermal Vacuum Optical System Alignment Testing and Analysis
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project is an international collaboration led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD. The Webb Telescope is NASA’s flagship observatory that will operate nearly a million miles away from Earth at the L2 Lagrange point. Webb’s optical design is a three-mirror anastigmat with four main optical…
Updated Performance Results of the Phase Four RF Thruster
We present the latest performance measurements of the Phase Four RF Thruster (RFT) from testing performed at The Aerospace Corporation and at Phase Four laboratories. The RFT is a nano-satellite-scalable, electrothermal radiofrequency thruster in development that uses RF power to heat xenon plasma propellant, and accelerate it in a radially diverging magnetic plume. The talk…