Power of persistence: Australian technology addresses challenge of space monitoring

Knowing what is going on in orbit is getting harder—yet hardly less necessary. But new technologies are emerging to cope with the challenge, including some that have come from Australian civilian research.

One example is the satellite-transmission monitoring system of Australia’s Quasar Satellite Technologies, which derived from work done by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Another is FireOPAL, a passive sensor system that my company, Lockheed Martin Australia, has helped develop by building on initial progress by Curtin University in Perth.

Satellites look down at the earth in peace and war to watch over the scene or to scrutinise part of it. Some inspect other satellites and may try to disrupt them. Some are designed for communications, including military communications. So, countries need to know what each other’s satellites are up to.

They need to know which satellites are in which orbits, how they have changed course and how many minutes ago they did that. What are they transmitting? Is that a foreign satellite moving close to one of ours, maybe to jam it, or is it a piece of orbital debris? Is it already jamming?

Since the first satellite rose into space in 1957, more than 6740 launches have placed another 20,000 into Earth’s orbit. At least 10,000 are functioning, and thousands more will come online over the next few years with the construction of mega-constellations. In addition, 40,000 pieces of debris of significant size are in orbit.

The traditional way to monitor all this is to point telescopes, radars and passive radio antennas at limited parts of the sky, assembling a mosaic of pictures, or to point the sensors at particular orbital objects, whether satellites or debris. But there are only so many such sensors, and the number of satellites and pieces of debris is rising.

Also, military satellite operators are getting better at executing surreptitious manoeuvres, so a satellite that had formerly been tracked on a certain orbit might now, unknown to the tracking country, be heading somewhere else. Additionally, a technique of near-constant manoeuvring is an emerging challenge for operators.

Altogether, risks are rising that surveillance systems, pressed to keep watch on the most important targets, will miss critical events in space involving other satellites, such as a manoeuvre, break-up or malfunction. Indeed, orbital objects are sometimes not known at all until they are discovered incidentally in surveillance that wasn’t targeting them.

Australian companies are stepping up with novel solutions. With advanced antenna technology, Quasar Satellite’s technology continuously surveils radio-frequency signals not from a single point but across a broad swathe of space—for monitoring as well as communications. The technology goes back to CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope installed in Western Australia for scientific research.

FireOPAL stares at the sky optically. Its origin was Curtin University technology for watching the larger sections of the sky to detect atmospheric entries by meteorites. The university and Lockheed Martin Australia have adapted it to track satellites.

The key point is that sensors such as FireOPAL don’t need to be tasked with pointing at a particular spot in the sky, spending time looking there while things are happening elsewhere; they look across a wide field of view.

At the 2024 Australian Meteorological and Oceanography Society conference, a report published by defence systems integrator Peraton and Lockheed Martin Australia demonstrated that persistent wide field of view, untasked optical observation by FireOPAL could reduce the interval between successive observations of a space object to seconds. This is a remarkable and potentially disruptive advancement, because it shifts the paradigm from tasking sensors and observations to an always-on approach.

When processed through a Peraton space-domain awareness system, data from FireOPAL can detect a satellite’s manoeuvre within 60 to 120 seconds. This compares with traditional detection-to-processing speeds that can be hours or even days. This allows those watching on-orbit activities—civil space agencies and defence organisations—to make operational responses faster—for example, avoiding the risk of a collision, or countering a foreign satellite’s potentially hostile approach to a friendly one.

More work is needed to overcome the challenge of proliferating space objects. The mission systems that control and make sense of the data need adaptation. They need to be able to receive information from supplementary sources to fill gaps in collection. Open mission systems that can plug and play with diverse data sets are critical.

These sources would include broad sensor mixes such as radars, which can see through bad weather and at night as well as day. Australian companies such as Quasar Satellite offer radio-frequency monitoring capabilities that can track the position of a satellite through its emissions. Another Australian champion is Silentium Defence, which provides space domain awareness observations with passive radars.

Both companies are viable options for adding to the sensor mix.

Australia stands to play a larger role in space-domain awareness through its security alliances and such advantages as geography and skilled workforce. It can further benefit by harnessing emerging commercial developments in the sector.