WASHINGTON — U.S. defense contractor SAIC and space monitoring firm LeoLabs have signed an agreement to jointly develop a space-tracking software platform.
The businesses are working on a prototype that they plan to roll out later this 12 months, Matthew Hungerford, chief technology officer of SAIC’s space business, told .
LeoLabs is a business provider of space traffic management services and data focused on low Earth orbit. It operates a worldwide network of space-monitoring phased array radars at six sites all over the world.
SAIC and LeoLabs will construct an area tracking tool on the Koverse data management platform, utilized by defense agencies and financial services firms due to its advanced zero-trust safety features. Koverse was acquired by SAIC in 2021.
Data might be analyzed with SAIC’s latest data science platform called Tenjin, designed to make artificial intelligence and machine-learning accessible to non-technical users, Hungerford said.
The businesses’ space-tracking platform would ingest data from the U.S. military’s space-track.org, conjunction data messages from LeoLabs and other sources comparable to the Space Force’s Unified Data Library.
The concept is to support “unique government use cases and data access requirements while leveraging LeoLabs’ business technology capabilities,” he said.
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Under the agreement, SAIC and LeoLabs will design and construct a prototype system, he said.
“We expect to have a minimum viable product available by 12 months’s end,” Hungerford said. Potential customers are the Department of Commerce’s space traffic management office, the U.S. Space Force’s space-tracking units and other government organizations which are searching for more advanced tools to investigate objects in space and improve the security of spacecraft in orbit.
The plan is to supply space visualizations, much like what LeoLabs offers to customers today, and add other features comparable to “machine to machine” messages that help predict close approaches in orbit, Hungerford said.
LeoLabs CEO and co-founder Dan Ceperley said the agreement with SAIC will give the corporate increased visibility with government agencies.
“LeoLabs is proud to partner with SAIC to supply a greater level of awareness for presidency agencies into space activities with continuous, reliable conjunction data and insights,” he said in an announcement.
LeoLabs earlier this 12 months unveiled latest data showing on-orbit maneuvers by Chinese and Russian satellites. Such a data prior to now was not available from business sources.