Orbit Logic has been awarded an AFWERX Direct to Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
The award will enhance the Heimdall Fire Space Situational Awareness (SSA) planning solution. Heimdall Fire is an existing software solution consisting of Orbit Logic COTS software products configured for SSA observation planning.
Heimdall Automated and Optimized SSA Sensor Tasking
This Phase II SBIR effort will start with the installation and configuration of the Heimdall Fire planning solution at the Catalyst Campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and enhancements to interface with and ingest commercial SSA observation plans. Commercial observation plans will be automatically converted to a standard Integrated Sensor Support Plan (ISSP) format.
These commercial ISSPs will be distributed for use by Department of Defnese (DoD) SSA planning and analysis systems. The contracted effort will also enhance Heimdall Fire to predict orbit accuracy based on planned observations and allow planning to achieve a user-specified orbit accuracy goal for any object at a specified time. The SBIR response is planned to include technology provided by Orbit Logic partner the University of Texas – Austin, and commercial observation interfaces and data from LeoLabs and Numerica.
The Heimdall Fire solution is commercially-available, scalable, configurable for new missions, and operationally-proven. The enhancements to be implemented under this contract will allow the software to meet even more government SSA needs out of the box.
Executive Comment
Paul Zetocha of the AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland stated, ”As the United States Space Force transforms operations to better leverage commercial capability for space operations, technologies are needed which will integrate commercial with traditional DoD owned systems. The new Orbit Logic AFWERX SBIR is one such effort that will seek to better integrate and schedule commercial and DoD sensor systems.”