United States Space Surveillance Network

United States Space Surveillance Network

The United States Space Surveillance Network is a critical part of United States Strategic Command's (USSTRATCOM) mission and involves detecting, tracking, cataloging and identifying artificial objects orbiting Earth, i.e. active/inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, or fragmentation debris. Space surveillance accomplishes the following:

  • Predict when and where a decaying space object will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere;
  • Prevent a returning space object, which to radar looks like a missile, from triggering a false alarm in missile-attack warning sensors of the U.S. and other countries;
  • Chart the present position of space objects and plot their anticipated orbital paths;
  • Detect new man-made objects in space;
  • Correctly map objects travelling in the earth's orbit;
  • Produce a running catalog of man-made space objects;
  • Determine which country owns a re-entering space object;
  • Inform NASA whether or not objects may interfere with satellites and International Space Station orbits.

The SPACETRACK program represents a worldwide Space Surveillance Network (SSN) of dedicated, collateral, and contributing electro-optical, passive radio frequency (rf) and radar sensors. The SSN is tasked to provide space object cataloging and identification, satellite attack warning, timely notification to U.S. forces of satellite fly-over, space treaty monitoring, and scientific and technical intelligence gathering. The continued increase in satellite and orbital debris populations, as well as the increasing diversity in launch trajectories, non-standard orbits, and geosynchronous altitudes, necessitates continued modernization of the SSN to meet existing and future requirements and ensure their cost-effective supportability.

SPACETRACK also developed the systems interfaces necessary for the command and control, targeting, and damage assessment of a potential future U.S. anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) system. There is an Image Information Processing Center and Supercomputing facility at the Air Force Maui Optical Station (AMOS). The resources and responsibility for the HAVE STARE Radar System development were transferred to SPACETRACK from an intelligence program per Congressional direction in FY93.

Read more about United States Space Surveillance Network:  1957–1963, Missile Warning and Space Surveillance in The Eisenhower Years, US Space Catalog, Shemya and Diyarbakir Radar Sites, Space Surveillance Network, Air Force Space Surveillance System, Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance, Space Based Visible (SBV) Sensor

Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, space and/or network:

    “I thought it altogether proper that I should take a brief furlough from official duties at Washington to mingle with you here to-day as a comrade, because every President of the United States must realize that the strength of the Government, its defence in war, the army that is to muster under its banner when our Nation is assailed, is to be found here in the masses of our people.”
    —Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)

    “Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.”
    —Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)

    “The admission of the States of Wyoming and Idaho to the Union are events full of interest and congratulation, not only to the people of those States now happily endowed with a full participation in our privileges and responsibilities, but to all our people. Another belt of States stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
    —Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)

    “It is the space inside that gives the drum its sound.”
    —Hawaiian saying no. 1189, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)

    “Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?”
    —George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)