U.S. Air Force reveals ‘neighborhood watch’ spy satellite program
Source: Yahoo News
The United States plans to launch
a pair of satellites to keep tabs on spacecraft from other countries
orbiting 22,300 miles above the planet, as well as to track space
debris, the head of Air Force Space Command said.
The previously classified
Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) will
supplement ground-based radars and optical telescopes in tracking
thousands of pieces of debris so orbital collisions can be avoided,
General William Shelton said at the Air Force Association meeting in
Orlando on Friday.
He called it a “neighborhood
watch program” that will provide a more detailed perspective on space
activities. He said the satellites, scheduled to be launched this year,
also will be used to ferret out potential threats from other spacecraft.
The program “will bolster our
ability to discern when adversaries attempt to avoid detection and to
discover capabilities they may have which might be harmful to our
critical assets at these higher altitudes,” Shelton said in the speech,
which also was posted on the Air Force Association’s website.
The two-satellite network, built by Orbital Sciences Corp will drift
around the orbital corridor housing much of the world’s communications
satellites and other spacecraft.
The Air Force currently tracks
about 23,000 pieces of orbiting debris bigger than about 4 inches. These
range from old rocket bodies to the remains of an exploded Chinese
satellite.
The Air Force released a fact
sheet emphasizing the program’s debris-monitoring abilities. Brian
Weeden, technical advisor with the Washington-based Secure World
Foundation, said the U.S. military already has a satellite in a better
position to do that job.
“I think the (Obama) Administration is being more honest when it says
that it declassified this program to try and deter attacks on U.S.
satellites,” in geostationary, or GEO, orbits located about 23,000 miles
above Earth, Weeden wrote in an email to Reuters.
“The U.S. has a lot of very
specialized and important national security satellites in the GEO region
and it is very concerned about protecting those satellites … so by
telling other countries that it has some ability to closely monitor
objects near GEO and their behavior, the U.S. hopes that will deter
other countries from attacking its important satellites,” Weeden said.
The new satellites also will give the U.S. military greater insight into what other countries have in orbit.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,
but it is exactly the sort of thing the U.S. is worried other countries
will do to it,” Weeden added.
Costs and technical details of the program were not released.
The satellites are scheduled for
launch aboard an unmanned Delta 4 rocket, built by United Launch
Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, from Cape
Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida during the last quarter of 2014.
Shelton said two replacement satellites are targeted for launch in 2016.
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