The U.S. Space Force desires to have the opportunity to discover and track mysterious objects in orbit.
The Space Force’s Space Training and Readiness Command, or STARCOM, which is tasked with educating and training U.S. Space Force personnel, recently published a document titled “Space Doctrine Publication 3-100, Space Domain Awareness” that outlines what space domain awareness (SDA) is and find out how to establish and maintain it. In a nutshell, SDA means with the ability to discover, understand, track and maintain custody of all of the assorted objects in orbit around Earth.
Many of the document describes the necessity to take care of a secure environment by monitoring and tracking such objects as pieces of space debris, the ever-growing number of economic satellites, spacecraft operated by adversaries, and “the hazards posed by the space environment and natural debris” similar to meteoroids or solar flares.
Nonetheless, the document goes on to notice that operating safely in space also requires “the power to rapidly discover and reply to threats and hazards, including objects that exhibit abnormal observables and patterns of life and can’t by correlated to any owner or point of origin.” So what might these objects be?
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More often than not, these are objects launched by other nations. The STARCOM document points out that it’s “imperative for the protection of space operations that the US not only knows where objects and spacecraft are at any given time, but in addition how they got there, who owns them, their potential capabilities, and their operator’s intent.”
The publication goes on to stipulate the numerous ways this ability could be achieved, including the usage of radar systems, infrared and optical sensors, radio frequency monitoring, orbital space weather stations, and through the use of information produced by the intelligence community.
Still, even with the multitude of the way the U.S. Space Force and other organizations keep track of objects in Earth’s orbit, recent events display how some can go unattributed.
In a single example from early 2022, a rogue rocket was seen hurtling toward the moon. While most observers noted the rocket was likely a booster from China’s Chang’e 5-T1 lunar mission, China itself denied the claim.
China’s reusable space plane has also been observed releasing unknown payloads into orbit as recently as October 2022.
Earlier, in 2014, space tracking stations observed an unknown object alongside three Russian satellites. It was believed to be either an anti-satellite device or an inspector spacecraft, but it ultimately remained unidentified.
In light of those and other developments, the Space Force is attempting to maintain a more in-depth eye on what is going on on in orbit. In October 2023, Space Force’s Space Systems Command chosen several private firms to assist speed up the event of recent technologies related to space domain awareness, in accordance with SpaceNews.
Earlier this 12 months, United Launch Alliance launched the Space Force’s secretive Silent Barker spacecraft, designed to be a “watchdog” over satellites in geosynchronous orbit, the region of space some 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) up that permits spacecraft to stay stationary above fixed points on Earth.
And in 2022, the Pentagon created AARO, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, whose mission is to try to detect, discover and attribute “anomalous, unidentified space” objects, in addition to those in air or water, or people who appear to travel between these domains. To this point, the office has found “no credible evidence” that any of those anomalous objects are extraterrestrial in origin.
But despite the necessity for more awareness of what’s in space and who could be operating it, “space domain capabilities for space awareness are still lagging,” Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Probability Saltzman said in April 2023.