U.S. Air Force’s new radar system plays a vital role as space becomes more congested and contested with satellites and orbital debris, according to the news release put out by Lockheed Martin.
The aerospace giant reported U.S. Air Force’s Space Fence system detected the breakup field from an anti-satellite test conducted by Indiaduring a scheduled endurance exercise of the new space surveillance radar.
As MICROSAT-R was expected to pass through the un-cued surveillance fence, Space Fence automatically issued a “breakup alert” indicating there were multiple objects within close proximity. Space Fence observed a significant amount of debris tracks surrounding the time of the event crossing labeled as uncorrelated targets. Long-arc tracking was initiated within the orbital debris cloud to form accurate initial orbit determinations. With this information, the system was able to automatically predict and correlate the next crossing time.Read More…
