There is currently nearly $900 billion in material orbiting the Earth right now. This includes large human occupied platforms (such as the ISS) but consists mostly of spacecraft that people on Earth use every day. Satellite communications, space imagery, and GPS have a large economic impact and likewise have important logistics needs.
The human presence in Low Earth Orbit is also expected to grow due to the advent of space tourism. This will vastly increase the need for certain logistics elements to be in place. Food, fuel, and maintenance materials will need to compliment maintenance procedures on orbit.
Saber Astronautics is developing technologies, tactics, and procedures to support these needs.
Our Operations research aims to streamline methods of command and control. Refined space operations allows our customers to reduce overhead costs of day to day monitoring and controlling spacecraft and increasing safety. This has other benefits here on Earth, as Saber Astronautics methods are useful in a wide range of industry problems.
Research and development occurs in the following areas:
1. Systems of Systems (SoS). Saber Astronautics conducts "cutting edge" leading research in the behavior, modeling, and commanding of groups of interacting systems. This directly applies to large scale human-robotic/machine problems, satellite and UAV constellation control, as well as engineering and coordinating large and complex spacecraft missions.
2. Common Operating Picture (COP). Product development focus is heavily motivated in providing COP. In space COP will allow astronauts greater safety and situational awareness in orbit, on the Moon, or on Mars. The algorithms are equally useful in terrestrial applications. We intend to apply our techniques to security, industrial engineering, and automated mining problems.
3. Space Environment tools. Space environment and space weather effects can impact spacecraft operations and terrestrial communications. With current technology, events are predicted to the same accuracy as terrestrial weather was in the 1950s. We are working towards real time dissimenation and prediction of space weather events. This will improve safety and reduce maintenance costs of working in space.
Please contact us to see how these areas can be applied to your company's operations.
Our commercial projects tie in closely with our scientific research, which investigates making a spacecraft operationally responsive to dynamic environments and customer needs. Responsiveness is driven by measuring spacecraft health. If a problem occurs the spacecraft controller must manually inspect large quantities of health data to determine causes and effects. Lacking global models, the spacecraft is represented in a brute force fashion. Major space programs, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, still use Microsoft Excel and Word to conduct analysis, requiring a fair amount of operator overhead.
In order for 3d graphics to be useful, we need to understand how things interact 'under the hood'. Individual spacecraft subsystems are currently modeled very well, however there are no models to show how the subsystems interact with each other. Therefore, if a problem occurs, such as a space weather event, the spacecraft controller still must manually inspect large quantities of health data to figure out why. The problem's cause could be a degredation on the spacecraft or it can be due to space weather events.
Our approach is to treat the spacecraft-groundstation-environment as a large System of Systems. We are working to measure all aspects of this system, then use artificial intelligence tools to actively learn the interactions, showing causes-and-effect based on statistics in the telemetry. The approach, a continuation of PhD level research, has so far been demonstrated in modelling the behavior of some highly complex systems: multiple UAV teams, lunar base performance, rocket propulsion performance, spacecraft impact analysis, as well as some early human-robotic interaction work.
