Submission + - USAF thinking of sharing space surveillance data with scientists (spacenews.com)
Taco Cowboy writes: The data could be redacted nevertheless the United States Air Force is thinking of open up its treasure trove of space surveillance data that the military doesn’t need for its space situational awareness mission could be made available to scientists interested in using that data to search for asteroids or other research
“We collect a lot of data, and a lot of data we throw off to the side because it isn’t relevant to national security,” Whelan said in a talk at an asteroid science symposium here March 26 organized by the Universities Space Research Association and George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “Our trash is your treasure”
With upgrades to the network, including the upcoming Space Surveillance Telescope and the Space Fence radar, will provide the Air Force will vast amounts of additional data, which the service plans to process only to the level needed to carry out its mission of tracking objects in Earth orbit
“We’re going to have all of this data. We’re not going to process it as deeply as you might process data,” he said. “We will consume what we want to consume, the rest of it will go onto the floor”
Whelan said DARPA will hand over the telescope to the Air Force to incorporate into the Space Surveillance Network by 2017. “Those of you who have played with this know that it is a vacuum cleaner. It sucks up all kinds of data,” he said of the telescope
That telescope, coupled with the Space Fence radar system scheduled to begin operating by 2019, will greatly increase the Air Force’s ability to track satellites and other objects in Earth orbit. “We expect our catalog to explode in size,” Whelan said, from the current 22,000 objects being tracked to more than 50,000
In a separate presentation at the symposium, Mark Boslough of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico showed a map of airbursts in the upper atmosphere caused by exploding meteors. He described the data, released just in the last few months, as coming from “U.S. government sensors” without being more specific. It is widely believed, however, that the information comes from U.S. missile warning satellites
Those data showed approximately 550 such events from 1994 through 2013, including the February 2013 airburst above Chelyabinsk, Russia, that released the equivalent of nearly half a megaton of TNT. That single event, Boslough said, accounted for at least as much energy as all the others combined
“We collect a lot of data, and a lot of data we throw off to the side because it isn’t relevant to national security,” Whelan said in a talk at an asteroid science symposium here March 26 organized by the Universities Space Research Association and George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “Our trash is your treasure”
With upgrades to the network, including the upcoming Space Surveillance Telescope and the Space Fence radar, will provide the Air Force will vast amounts of additional data, which the service plans to process only to the level needed to carry out its mission of tracking objects in Earth orbit
“We’re going to have all of this data. We’re not going to process it as deeply as you might process data,” he said. “We will consume what we want to consume, the rest of it will go onto the floor”
Whelan said DARPA will hand over the telescope to the Air Force to incorporate into the Space Surveillance Network by 2017. “Those of you who have played with this know that it is a vacuum cleaner. It sucks up all kinds of data,” he said of the telescope
That telescope, coupled with the Space Fence radar system scheduled to begin operating by 2019, will greatly increase the Air Force’s ability to track satellites and other objects in Earth orbit. “We expect our catalog to explode in size,” Whelan said, from the current 22,000 objects being tracked to more than 50,000
In a separate presentation at the symposium, Mark Boslough of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico showed a map of airbursts in the upper atmosphere caused by exploding meteors. He described the data, released just in the last few months, as coming from “U.S. government sensors” without being more specific. It is widely believed, however, that the information comes from U.S. missile warning satellites
Those data showed approximately 550 such events from 1994 through 2013, including the February 2013 airburst above Chelyabinsk, Russia, that released the equivalent of nearly half a megaton of TNT. That single event, Boslough said, accounted for at least as much energy as all the others combined
