On October 15, Colorado Springs, CO-based Auria, a provider of space operations, space domain awareness, and space test and training solutions and software for federal, international, and commercial customers, announced the Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded Auria a four-year contract to mature a satellite onboard architecture called the Satellite Fusion, Inference and Reasoning Engine (SaFIRE) in support of enhanced awareness and satellite resilience. Auria is backed by Enlightenment Capital.
Upcoming experimentation will validate SaFIRE’s ability to autonomously plan optimal sensor collections using an agile camera assembly in support of local neighborhood Resident Space Object (RSO) catalog monitoring. Interleaved with this nominal activity, SaFIRE will also perform local searches to identify new, potentially unknown RSOs and track their movements. Optimizing a resource plan for these competing observation tasks requires consideration of local lighting conditions, the relative orbital dynamics of proximal RSOs, and the capabilities of the hosting satellite’s bus and sensors. SaFIRE dynamically determines attitude slew paths that do not violate keepout constraints associated with the local sensors or other externally facing satellite bus hardware. These constraints can be numerous and challenging to accommodate in a congested orbital environment.
Successful experiment demonstration will result in full flight qualification of the SaFIRE software suite, which is underpinned by Auria’s Autonomous Planning System (APS) onboard planning architecture. APS is a modular commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solution that has been applied to a broad range of single-asset and collaborative mission use cases from underwater robotic assets to Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) collection planning to lunar and planetary exploration. The APS framework was fully flight qualified on the Space Development Agency’s POET experiment in 2022 on Loft Orbital’s YAM-3 mission.
Source: Auria
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