April 12, 2011
Swirling thousands of miles above earth, military satellites provide critical capabilities to warfighters—which makes protecting them from collision with space debris, meteors and microsatellites a top priority. Until now, monitoring the deep regions of space has been difficult, with spots and gaps in coverage leaving these high-flying machines vulnerable. DARPA’s newly developed Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) aims to change that, ushering in a new era of ground-based space surveillance technology to fill coverage gaps and offer an unprecedented wide-angle view of small objects in deep space.
“Currently we have a ‘soda straw’ view of deep space, where we can only see one narrow segment of space at a time,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Travis Blake, DARPA’s Space Surveillance Telescope program manager. “The Space Surveillance Telescope should give us a much wider ‘windshield’ view of deep space objects, significantly enhancing our space situational awareness.”
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