FORT COLLINS, Colorado. (July 18, 2019) — With the increasing number of both active satellites and debris objects in orbit about the Earth, the space domain is quickly becoming more congested and contested. For the last decade, Numerica Corporation has been developing solutions to improve the collective understanding of the evolving space environment and is demonstrating the utility of its commercially augmented mission operations (CAMO) system for enhanced space situational awareness (SSA) under a new partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
AFRL leveraged the Defense Innovation Unit and the Commercial Solutions Opening process to competitively and rapidly award agreements with non-traditional, venture-class companies who have mature commercial solutions to view, characterize, and predict the changing physical location of objects in orbit around the Earth.
Numerica’s SSA team is building the most complete, commercially-available, on-demand deep-space catalog, and under CAMO, is sharing a real-time data feed to support government activities including operations and research and development efforts.
This data feed of information is produced from the Numerica Telescope Network (NTN) of more than 130 optical sensors positioned worldwide that provide complete and persistent nightly coverage of geostationary orbit (GEO). With its best-of-breed space surveillance tracking software, the Multiple Frame Assignment Space Tracker (MFAST), Numerica improves the security of both commercial and government interests in space.
Lt. Jackie Cromer, the AFRL CAMO Program Manager, stated “The Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate is excited at the opportunity to work with Numerica and to explore how commercial data from their telescope network along with their data analytics algorithms can be used to enhance DoD space operations”.
“Numerica is excited to be a part of CAMO and delivering SSA data to space operators and system developers,” Todd Brost said, Numerica’s Director of Special Programs. “Our network provides a diversity of locations and sensors which greatly increases the collection opportunity, and when combined with Numerica’s advanced processing, ensures accurate orbital states and a high likelihood of space object detection. We look forward to demonstrating how Numerica data can be a key component to understanding the contested space domain.”
“Numerica’s CAMO contract is a major achievement for the company and provides a vehicle for demonstrating Numerica-developed commercial SSA capabilities,” said Dr. Jeff Aristoff, Numerica’s VP of Space Systems, who began leading Numerica’s SSA team in 2014. “These commercial capabilities stem, in part, from our partnership with AFRL and their early support of Numerica’s R&D efforts.”
NTN data and information products are now available via the Unified Data Library (UDL). This real-time data feed will continue until at least March 2020. Additional NTN data products and services are coming soon.
For more information about Numerica and their SSA capabilities, visit www.numerica.us.
About Numerica: Founded in 1996, Numerica focuses on creating innovative solutions to the most pressing technical challenges faced by customers in the areas of air and missile defense and space situational awareness. Headquartered in Fort Collins, Numerica’s rapidly growing team of talented research scientists and engineers tackle data science problems by developing advanced algorithms to power mission-critical national security software. The critical SSA mission involves the detection, tracking, identification and characterization of all near Earth-orbiting objects and the prediction of events, threats, and activities in space. Numerica’s state-of-the-art technologies have been deployed around the world to integrate networks, fuse data, precisely track targets, and quantify uncertainty.
Learn more at www.numerica.us.