tech track papers

Categories: 2017, Space Situational Awareness

An Innovative, High Fidelity Approach to Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Data Simulation

Space Situational Awareness (SSA) is vital to maintaining our Space Superiority. We present an innovative, high fidelity, time-based simulation tool, PROXOR™ (Proximity Operations and Rendering), which supports SSA by generating realistic mission scenarios including sensor frame data with corresponding truth. This is a unique and critical tool for supporting mission architecture studies, new capability (algorithm) development, current/future capability performance analysis, and mission performance prediction. PROXOR™ provides a flexible architecture for sensor and resident space object (RSO) orbital motion and attitude control that simulates SSA, rendezvous and proximity operations scenarios. The major elements of interest are based on the ability to accurately simulate all aspects of the RSO model, viewing geometry, imaging optics, sensor detector, and environmental conditions. These capabilities enhance the realism of mission scenario models and generated mission image data.

As an input, PROXOR™ uses a library of 3-D satellite models containing 10+ satellites, including low-earth orbit (e.g., DMSP) and geostationary (e.g., Intelsat) spacecraft, where the spacecraft surface properties are those of actual materials and include Phong and Maxwell-Beard bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) coefficients for accurate radiometric modeling. We calculate the inertial attitude, the changing solar and Earth illumination angles of the satellite, and the viewing angles from the sensor as we propagate the RSO in its orbit. The synthetic satellite image is rendered at high resolution and aggregated to the focal plane resolution resulting in accurate radiometry even when the RSO is a point source.

In this paper, we present an overview of PROXOR™ plus simulation results of SSA missions.

Downloads

Author: Susan Hagerty
Topic: Space Situational Awareness

  • An Innovative, High Fidelity Approach to Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Data Simulation

    Download File