Space surveillance telescope could head down under

The telescope the defense department uses to track space debris to make sure it doesn’t hit satellites, could be headed to Australia to get a different point of view on the heavens.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency said on Nov. 14 that its ground-based Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) may soon be sent to the other side of the planet. An agreement reached between DARPA aand Australia’s Department of Defense will allow the agency to take the 180,000 lb. three-mirror Mersenne-Schmidt telescope to Australia to track and catalogues space debris and objects unique to the space above that region of the world that could threaten DoD satellites. In the joint agreement, the U.S. and Australia have decided to work towards the establishment of the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Australian soil.

The SST project begun in 2002, said DARPA, was developed to detect and track previously unseen small objects at the deep space altitudes associated with geosynchronous orbits (roughly 22,000 miles high). The SST can search an area in space the size of the U.S. in seconds, it said. The telescope also uses the first large curved charge coupled device focal array and currently has the steepest primary mirror ever polished allowing the telescope to have the fastest optics of this aperture class.

The system can detect a small laser pointer on top of New York City’s Empire State Building from a distance equal to Miami, FL, it said. All those features combine to provide orders of magnitude improvements in field of view and scanning for deep space surveillance, said DARPA.

“We value the partnership with Australia that allows us to widen our space situational awareness and share some of our revolutionary technology advances in space surveillance,” said Travis Blake, DARPA program manager. “This technology development effort could benefit both nations as we catalogue and detect entire sets of currently uncharted objects that are in geosynchronous orbit above Australia.”

The SST will feed the data it captures into the Space Surveillance Network, a U.S. Air Force program charged with cataloguing and observing space objects to identify potential near-term collisions with assets in space. The SSN is a worldwide network of 29 space surveillance sensors, including radar and optical telescopes, both military and civilian.

DARPA and Australia will also continue to provide deep space surveillance data to NASA for small asteroid detection and to the scientific community.