The Office of Space Commerce (OSC) has announced a one month extension of its ongoing Consolidated Pathfinder project in support of the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS).
Initiated in January of 2024, the Consolidated Pathfinder is a limited-term effort that focuses on space situational awareness (SSA) for LEO. The project is designed to explore how commercial SSA capabilities can be tested and integrated by the government. Lessons learned in the pathfinder are accelerating OSC’s ability to procure and integrate sustained commercial SSA data and capabilities for the operational TraCSS system.
Through its partner NASA, OSC has placed new orders for commercial SSA data and services on the Global Data Marketplace with all five companies participating in the Consolidated Pathfinder – COMSPOC, Kayhan Space, LeoLabs, Slingshot Aerospace, and SpaceNav. The new orders bring the total amount that OSC is spending over the course of the Consolidated Pathfinder to $15.5 million.
In order to further validate the metrics to be leveraged by the operational TraCSS system, the pathfinder’s live data collection period is being extended to June 30, 2024. The extension also allows the OSC team and the pathfinder companies to gather additional data, further explore specific technical opportunities to improve performance, and conduct additional analysis for robust metric validation. Metric validation for the operational TraCSS system is the primary objective for the pathfinder.
Earlier this year, the Consolidated Pathfinder project team completed a preparation period and entered into a live data collection period. The preparation period involved: setting up a cloud-based, OSC-owned storage solution to support conduct in a test environment; setting up and confirming data flows from observation to the production of conjunction data messages (CDMs) across two LEO data providers with diverse phenomenologies and an orbit determination provider; collaboratively building a mission planning tool; and developing a set of metrics to be validated during the live data collection period.
Since the live data collection period kicked off, the OSC team and participating companies have confirmed regular data flows from observation to the production of CDMs, with follow-up tasking from the mission planning tool.
To support the project objectives, the pathfinder companies have built and are maintaining a space object catalog encompassing a majority of the LEO regime. The pathfinder also integrates data quality monitoring service providers to conduct data evaluation.
OSC is developing TraCSS as a modern, cloud-based IT system that will provide basic SSA and space traffic coordination services to commercial and civil space operators for spaceflight safety, space sustainability, and international coordination. OSC is steadily progressing on building out the TraCSS architecture, with multiple inputs and on-ramps for commercial data, services, software, and innovation.