WASHINGTON — SRI International announced Oct. 4 it chosen the defense technology firm Leidos and startup Scout Space as subcontractors for an area debris-tracking project funded by the U.S. intelligence community.
SRI, a nonprofit research institute based in Menlo Park, California, is one in all 4 firms that won contracts from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to try and track tiny debris objects in orbit that currently are undetectable by ground-based sensors.
The project, often called Space Debris Identification and Tracking (SINTRA), is predicted to be accomplished in 4 years. IARPA is an agency under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
IARPA desires to discover technologies and methods to successfully track debris objects smaller than 10 centimeters long, or in regards to the size of a bank card.
“Small debris is an unaddressed and growing threat,” said Lin van Nieuwstadt, a senior engineer at SRI and principal investigator. Even objects as small as paint chips may cause serious damage to spacecraft.
‘A difficult problem’
As much as scientists have worked on this issue for many years, “it’s such a difficult problem to have a look at the small objects,” van Nieuwstadt told .
SRI will experiment with latest approaches to investigate radar data to be able to hone in on the smallest debris objects in low Earth orbit, she said. “We hope to increase reliable tracking of objects in space right down to previously unobservable scales.”
SRI has extensive experience using radar to trace space objects, van Nieuwstadt noted. The corporate LeoLabs, which operates a world network of radar sensors to observe low Earth orbit, was founded in 2016 in Menlo Park by former SRI International executives.
For the SINTRA project, SRI is not going to be working with LeoLabs. It is going to use data from a radar site the corporate manages for the National Science Foundation at Poker Flat in Alaska, and from other ground-based sensors.
The corporate plans to check data from multiple radar instruments to see how radar signals already being beamed into space from large transmitter antennas could incidentally bounce off small space debris and return to receiver antennas. SRI operates a steerable radio telescope at Stanford University that will serve because the receiver.
‘Improve the algorithm’
Once the team starts collecting data, said van Nieuwstadt, “we’ll improve the algorithm to make it finer” so smaller objects will be identified. “That’s the key sauce that we’re attempting to provide you with.”
To gather data in orbit, SRI will work with Scout Space, a startup based in Alexandria, Virginia, that’s developing spaceborne sensors.
Sergio Gallucci, Scout’s chief technology officer, said the corporate is developing a payload that will support the SINTRA program in addition to other programs.
“A part of our effort is ensuring interoperability with quite a lot of potential hosts to facilitate future deployments of our payloads for space debris sensing,” he said in a press release to .
Scout’s payloads expected to launch within the near future, he said, “may contribute to in-space debris tracking under this program, but we’re primarily supporting design, processing, and exploitation of solutions.”
Leidos, based in Reston, Virginia, will do plasma modeling for the SINTRA project.
This may help investigate a kind of signature, or plasma waves, created by debris as they fly through plasma within the upper regions of Earth’s atmosphere and in radiation clouds farther out in space. The thought is to attempt to detect the plasma waves using existing sensor technology.
“These plasma signatures might need been previously ignored because we weren’t searching for them, not realizing their potential usefulness,” said Tony van Eyken, director of the Center for GeoSpace Studies at SRI and co-principal investigator.