Gallucci to Lead Space-based Debris Sensor area for SRI SINTRA Team
As seen on Geospatial World, SpaceNews, SatNews, and others on October 4, 2023:
In brief:
The SINTRA program awarded by IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) aims to revolutionize our ability to detect, track, and characterize orbital space debris smaller than 10 cm which are currently untrackable from the ground. Resulting technologies hold the potential to protect crewed spacecraft and other valuable space assets from these compact threats, which are difficult to detect and track and can cause significant damage. The SINTRA program began in mid-2023 and is anticipated to be a four-year effort to successfully track debris objects smaller than 10 centimeters long, or about the size of a credit card.
“Small debris is an unaddressed and growing threat,” said Lin van Nieuwstadt, a senior engineer at SRI and the Principal investigator for SRI. “Currently, there are more than 100 million objects larger than 1mm orbiting the Earth; however, less than 1 percent of mission-ending debris are currently tracked.” She noted: “we hope to extend reliable tracking of objects in space down to previously unobservable scales.”
SRI has extensive experience using radar to track space objects, van Nieuwstadt noted. The company LeoLabs, which operates a global network of radar sensors to monitor low Earth orbit, was founded in 2016 in Menlo Park by former SRI International executives.
To collect data in orbit, SRI will work with SCOUT Space, a startup based in Alexandria, Virginia, that is developing spaceborne sensors. Sergio Gallucci, Co-founder and CTO of SCOUT Space, who is leading the team’s space-based sensors mission area, shared a statement with SpaceNews:
“[SCOUT] is developing a payload that would support the SINTRA project as well as other programs. Part of our effort is ensuring interoperability with a variety of potential hosts to facilitate future deployments of our payloads for space debris sensing.”
The team aims to integrate both radio-frequency and electro-optical sensing modalities.
Additional quotes by Sergio Gallucci:
Space debris detection and tracking is a very hard problem, and characterization is sometimes an entirely different problem which compounds that. There isn’t one catch-all solution available today, so we are leveraging various sensing modalities and core competencies to synthesize a means to proliferate one.
SCOUT’s expertise in on-orbit sensing and characterization uniquely positions us to integrate our partners’ RF (radio-frequency) sensing modalities with our own optical systems and enables us to support a framework of distributed on-orbit sensing to better understand space debris.
We have assembled a team which shares an amazing spread of in-depth knowledge of this field, and I am proud of that. We are looking forward to working with SRI and Leidos to realize the concept of a ubiquitous space-based debris sensor.