AGI, Business Partners Opened Space Situational Awareness Facility In March

Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI) along with a consortium of business partners announces that the Commercial Space Operations Center (ComSpOC) has reached several new milestones since its announcement in March 2014.

AGI’s ComSpOC is a space situational awareness (SSA) facility that fuses satellite-tracking measurements from a continually growing global network of commercial sensors owned and operated by business partners. The ComSpOC generates High Definition Ephemeris (HiDEph) and other highly accurate SSA data products for resident space object (RSO) characterization.

Since its announcement, the ComSpOC has established closed-loop tracking with sites and successfully tracked a recent space launch. In only six months since inception, the ComSpOC is now tracking 1,200 total space objects, 73% of all active geosynchronous (GEO) satellites and 100% of all active GEO satellites over the continental U.S. The ComSpOC is currently using more than 22 optical sensors, three radio frequency (RF) interferometry sites and one radar site. RF data processing now allows the ComSpOC to do near real-time maneuver characterization and continuous custody for active GEOs.

The SpaceBook, a service that currently provides data including, status, orbit mission and owner information of all tracked objects, is now live. In the future, this will serve as a subscription-based portal for ComSpOC data such as health, status, event and trending information of all tracked objects.

AGI, along with founding business partners such as ExoAnalytic Solutions, SRI International and Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, is looking to continue the rapid growth of the ComSpOC. They are calling for commercial data providers, research organizations and innovative hardware developers to contribute to the ComSpOC mission and advance SSA by providing the most accurate and robust system of integrated commercial tracking sensors in the world. By expanding business partners to a broader set of organizations, AGI and its current partners seek to foster an open community in which all can contribute, and all can benefit by publishing inputs and outputs in a data standard.

“The ComSpOC has been able to accomplish extraordinary things in a short amount of time. Now is the time to expand our community to increase the safety of flight not only for commercial missions, but for government missions as well,” says Paul Graziani, AGI Chief Executive Officer.

(Image courtesy of Analytical Graphics, Inc.)

FMI: www.agi.com