In a SpaceNews article, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. James Syring, head of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), emphasizes that "the organization must have a space-based sensor layer as part of its long-term plans." Detection, tracking, and discrimination of orbital and suborbital objects, particularly new ones, is critical in missile defense. Space-based sensors can provide continuous coverage of strategic regions of space in support of such activities.
Here at Georgia Tech, we have been actively investigating such concepts and algorithms, and have gone so far as to design and build just such a space-based system. Our RECONSO 6U CubeSat, funded by AFRL and AFOSR in 2013 with a set launch in April 2018, possesses much of this capability. RECONSO sports a wide field-of-view electro-optical sensor and can detect and track relatively dim objects in real-time. While RECONSO's mission focuses on Space Situational Awareness, rather than explicit missile defense, the two missions certainly have similarities.
Undergraduate and Graduate students at GT have been working tirelessly on RECONSO for several years now, and are presently working on integration and testing activities before shipping the CubeSat out for environmental testing and launch.
The full SpaceNews story is here.
