SBSS Launch Should Mean Better Space Situational Awareness

SBSS Launch Should Mean Better Space Situational Awareness

The Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) System satellite was successfully launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base last night on a Minotaur 4 rocket.

SBSS is intended to provide space-based data on the locations of satellites and space debris. Knowing exactly where objects in space are — and where their operators plan to move them if they are active — is critical to avoid collisions like the 2009 Iridium-Cosmos collision that created a cloud of space debris. That event, and China’s intentional destruction of one of its own satellites in a 2007 antisatellite test, added substantially to the amount of “stuff” in Earth orbit and catalyzed governments and commercial satellite operators to pay more attention to Space Situational Awareness (SSA). SSA and the need for nations and companies to behave responsibly in space to ensure it remains a sustainable environment for all to use is a major feature of President Obama’s new National Space Policy.

Today, only ground-based sensors are available to locate and track space objects. Approximately 22,000 pieces are tracked by the Joint Space Operations Center (part of U.S. Strategic Command). They are 10 centimeters or more in diameter. Thousands more smaller pieces also are thought to be in orbit.

Spaceflightnow.com quotes SBSS mission director Col. J. R. Gordon as saying that the satellite will “revolutionize the way we track objects in space by not being constrained by weather, the atmosphere or the time of day.”

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