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The L3Harris system upgrade will increase GBOSS resiliency and facilitate more persistent coverage supporting Space Domain Awareness across the DoD.
With space domain awareness at the top of senior military leaders’ priority lists, the U.S. Space Force is seeing new ground-based capabilities come online, deploying new satellites on orbit by the end of the year, and plotting the future of its space-based surveillance layer.
Several key programs meant to enhance the U.S. military’s ability to surveil the stars recently completed testing milestones or are moving forward. L3Harris Technologies is modernizing the Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) systems by upgrading the system’s telescopes under a program known as the Ground-Based Optical Sensor (GBOSS). The company recently refurbished 35-year-old telescopes at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, for which the Space Force has declared operational acceptance, the company announced Aug 5.
Through the GBOSS program, L3Harris modernized multiple telescope components, including the optics in the camera, as well as electronics and software capabilities, says Charles Clarkson, company vice president and general manager of space superiority and imaging.
The improvements will allow the GEODSS systems to scan twice as fast and identify space objects that are four times dimmer than what the system can see today, he notes. As space data trackers observe an exponential increase in the number of assets on orbit, the new and improved GEODSS will now be capable of seeing dimmer and farther targets, with the ability to see objects in cislunar orbits “and beyond,” Clarkson says.
Now that the White Sands upgrades have been accepted, L3Harris will focus on upgrading similar telescopes located in Maui, Hawaii, later this year, the company said. The U.S. military maintains a third GEODSS site on the island of Diego Garcia, but the Space Force has not funded sensor upgrades on that site to date.
Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman and the Space Force completed a critical testing milestone for the trinational Deep-Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) program, when the team proved it could combine the capability of seven ground-based antennas to operate as a single system at the first DARC site, located in Western Australia.
The DARC radar system eventually will involve three sites in Australia, the UK and the U.S., with Northrop Grumman on contract to build out the first two arrays in Australia and in Pembroke, Wales. The company’s solution harnesses multiple calibrated antenna arrays that operate together to provide the same 24/7 all-weather tracking capabilities as a larger, more expensive single antenna could provide.
The recent test with about a quarter of the DARC 1 site’s full range of antennas marked a significant step closer to a full capability, the company said Aug. 12.
“What we did there, is we used technology that really makes multiple antennas work together like a single, larger antenna, for the purposes of this demonstration,” Kevin Giammo, director of Northrop Grumman’s space surveillance and environmental intelligence, told Aviation Week.
Once operational, DARC will provide 24/7, all-weather monitoring and tracking for a broad array of objects in Geosynchronous orbit, including “very small objects,” Giammo said.
With the first site conducting testing, the environmental assessments and town planning processes are underway for DARC Site 2 in Wales, the Space Force said in February. The third site will be located in the continental U.S., although the Space Force has not announced its location nor awarded any development contracts. The service expects the global system to be fully online by 2032.
While the ground-based systems are moving forward, the Space Force also is preparing to bolster its space-based surveillance assets, with plans to launch new Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites by the end of this year.
The first GSSAP spacecraft began launching in 2014, and the seventh and eighth satellites are due for deployment by the end of 2025 as part of USSF-87, on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket. Two final spacecraft will fill out the 10-satellite constellation by 2027. Meanwhile, the Space Force is beginning to seek industry ideas to eventually replace the GSSAP constellation with commercially built assets under the new RG-XX program.
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