Space Situation Awareness Operations

The Space Situation Awareness Operations program, under the Air Force's Space Force, focuses on enhancing the United States' ability to monitor and understand activities in the space domain. This initiative is crucial for identifying and characterizing factors that could impact space operations, ensuring national security, safety, and economic stability. It supports the development and maintenance of sensors and information integration capabilities within the Space Domain Awareness network. The program works alongside another initiative that focuses on developing new sensors and improving information integration across the network.

A key component is the Ground-Based Optical Sensor System (GBOSS), which upgrades the existing Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance system. GBOSS aims to enhance monitoring capabilities for small, closely-spaced, and advanced threats across various orbital ranges. By improving sensitivity and search rates, this system helps detect previously undetectable space threats, reducing tactical surprises from adversaries. These enhancements support accurate and timely decision-making in response to challenges in the congested and contested space environment.

The GBOSS program includes significant upgrades to sites, incorporating advanced data exploitation techniques and rapid data dissemination capabilities. These improvements are designed to integrate coalition and commercial data sources, providing a comprehensive global capability to identify potential orbital attacks. Updates to image processing and optical subsystems will enhance operational sensitivity and enable high-fidelity characterization of space objects.

In FY 2023, efforts were made to develop artificial intelligence-driven autonomous sensor management systems as part of a congressional add-on project. This initiative aimed to demonstrate a prototype system leveraging AI for enhanced data analytics and sensor operations. The acquisition strategy emphasizes rapid development and fielding to address current gaps while collaborating with key defense centers to ensure effective data fusion and dissemination across military operations.