Resilience and Performance of Nontraditional Space Situational Awareness Sensor Architectures

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There is increasing interest in the adoption of distributed, multidomain space situational awareness (SSA) sensor architectures as a means of improving both mission performance and resilience while decreasing total cost. One promising concept calls for augmenting legacy terrestrial architectures with opportunistic sensors hosted on government and commercial spacecraft. This research explores this concept by simulating the observability of resident space objects (RSOs) in medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geosynchronous orbit (GEO) by 3300 candidate sensor network architectures. Over a simulated 48 h period, a network composed of 4 terrestrial telescopes and 10 hosted payloads in low Earth orbit revisited each of over 1200 MEO and GEO RSOs in under 8.5 h. This network also proved to be highly resilient, maintaining this revisit rate in an environment in which all terrestrial telescopes were inoperable. In this maximally degraded environment, over 600 space-based sensor networks were still capable of revisiting each RSO in under 24 h. Results of this research suggest that space-based opportunistic hosted payloads stand to concurrently improve the performance and resilience of existing SSA sensor networks used for deep space object catalog maintenance.