Aerospace industry analysts are wondering how the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) will give you the chance to attain a quadrupling within the production of agency satellites in the subsequent decade and whether a forecast ten-fold increase in signals and imagery collection will matter if the NRO doesn’t have adequate artificial intelligence (AI) to sort that data.
“Inside the subsequent decade, NRO expects to quadruple the variety of satellites we now have on orbit—different sizes, orbits, each industrial and national,” NRO Deputy Director Maj. Gen. Christopher Povak told a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ virtual forum on Oct. 10. “These satellites will deliver over 10 times as many signals and pictures that we collect today. The proliferation and diversification of our architecture will provide increased coverage, greater capability and resilience, and more timely delivery of information. It would create more persistent coverage over any area of the Earth, provide faster revisit rates, and increase the accuracy and fidelity of our data.”
One industry analyst said that the projected ten-fold increase in data is “the final thing” that NRO needs unless the agency can discover a strategy to harness that data increase.
NRO’s primary users have been the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) to offer strategic insights to the president, the intelligence community (IC), and Defense Department, but NRO has said that it’s moving to an increasing use of proliferated satellite constellations, industrial imagery, sensors, and to having the ability to support combatant commanders (COCOMs) and fielded military forces, not necessarily with raw data feeds but with NGA and NSA-processed data.
“This proliferation and diversification of our architecture will provide increased coverage, greater capability, resilience, revisit rates, and more timely delivery of information,” the NRO said on Oct. 12 in response to an issue on how the agency will quadruple the construct of NRO satellites and the way that ramping up will result in 10 times the gathering of images and signal collection.
“NRO may even see significant advantages from using existing systems in latest ways,” the agency said. “NRO can also be leveraging partnerships with industrial partners in addition to inside the IC and DoD. For instance, industrial launch systems are driving down the price of launch, enabling us to place more capability on orbit and deliver it faster while industrial production practices will enable us to construct more satellites at a lower cost. To maximise NRO’s architecture, NRO is developing tools and techniques to effectively manage and task the architecture so it will possibly rapidly convert data to information the user needs. We’ll proceed investing in AI and other technologies that may allow the system to find out what products could also be needed to handle intelligence issues.”
During the last two years, the NRO has been pursuing a industrial Broad Agency Announcement strategic framework for electro-optical and radar imagery, radio frequency data, and hyperspectral imagery.
As well as, the NRO has moved to extend the variety of launch locations for agency payloads from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. and Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. to Recent Zealand and Wallops Island, Va. Launch site proliferation may aid in replacing satellites lost during conflicts.
Povak said that “our production lines of systems, as an alternative of taking six to eight years to create one specific satellite, we at the moment are producing multiple satellites yearly.”
“With that inventory, with that production line, things like replenishment and reconstitution have gotten way more a possible for us than 10-15 years ago,” he said. “The NRO is what opportunities those might provide to us in our ability to answer a few of our customers.”
A combatant commander who has needed ground moving goal indication (GMTI) from a Northrop Grumman [NOC] Joint STARS aircraft has been capable of task the aircraft, however the concept of employment for a future GMTI space-based radar (SBR) to interchange the Joint STARS continues to be into consideration by the NRO and the U.S. Space Force–the necessities lead for SBR. The Pentagon Joint Requirements Oversight Council is to finalize such requirements.
“We’re working closely with the Department of Defense and the IC to have a greater understanding of the timeliness requirements, the precise capabilities, the coverage, the revisit rates, the fidelity of collection to be certain that, as we’re going out to the marketplace to find out what is out there to be certain that we’re getting those capabilities in a timeliness that’s relevant to all of our customers,” Povak said of NRO support for COCOMs.
Asked whether such timeliness may involve the NRO provision of agency raw data to COCOMs for their very own evaluation, Povak replied, “We’re working very hard to get dissemination of information to the last tactical mile” and that “that could be a partnership between us, NSA, NGA, and the combatant commands working closely together.”
“Our job is to be certain that we now have the contract mechanisms in place and the integrated architecture that permits us to process and disseminate that data based on our users’ needs,” he said.