Space Force-Backed Mission Does Its Best Impression Of Top Gun In Orbit
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
An ongoing military exercise happening hundreds of miles above Earth has-for the first time in an unclassified setting-demonstrated how future satellites might evade and pursue one another in a future conflict.
That was the announcement Wednesday from True Anomaly, one of the companies involved in the exercise. True Anomaly's Jackal satellite, also known as Panther, played the cat-and-mouse game with another spacecraft named Puma, based on Rocket Lab's Pioneer satellite platform.
"This is what we've really been building towards for the past four years," said Even Rogers, True Anomaly's co-founder and CEO.
The two satellites, each somewhere between the size of a dishwasher and a refrigerator, are part of the Victus Haze mission managed by the US Space Force. Victus Haze is the latest in a series of "responsive" Space Force missions aimed at demonstrating how the military and its commercial contractors can rapidly launch and deploy new satellites in reaction to an emerging threat or need.
The scenario for Victus Haze, set in motion earlier this year, involved the launch of True Anomaly's Jackal satellite in May. Rocket Lab's Puma satellite, already built and in storage, was on standby to quickly launch when it was time to start the exercise. Rocket Lab was on call to launch its Puma spacecraft within 24 hours of call-up by the Space Force.
That happened last month, when military officials informed Rocket Lab it was time to go. The company quickly rolled its Electron rocket and Puma satellite to a launch pad in New Zealand and launched them June 19, less than 17 hours after receiving the call-up. Within 38 hours, Rocket Lab had fully activated and prepared the Puma satellite for its first orbital maneuver, beating the Space Force's requirement of 72 hours.
The launch set up Puma for a series of burns to move in close to True Anomaly's satellite. The Space Force's criteria for success was to complete the rendezvous and photograph the target satellite in less than 84 hours. Rocket Lab reported it did the job in less than 59 hours, culminating in a head-to-head inspection and survey, with each satellite snapping pictures of the other.
One of the images, released by Rocket Lab, shows its satellite's view of True Anomaly's Jackal.
"You can see that we are actively tracking them," Rogers told Ars. "Our solar arrays are deflected, tracking the sun, and we are staring right down their boresight, which is just a really cool demonstration of our capability. We were tracking them while they were tracking us, and maintaining power-positive status."
It's easy to see the military utility for this type of capability. Imagine a mysterious military satellite launched by Russia or another space power. It suddenly starts approaching a multibillion-dollar US spy satellite with unknown intentions. To some degree, this is already happening in the real world. If US forces had a satellite on the shelf, they could quickly launch it directly into the same orbit as the adversary's satellite to take a closer look, and perhaps in the future, take action.
The rapid launch and initial rendezvous and inspections were only the opening salvo in the Victus Haze exercise. On July 14, True Anomaly and Rocket Lab received orders for Mission 2 of Victus Haze. The task? Pursue and evade one another over and over again. True Anomaly's Jackal, or Panther, satellite was commanded to move in on Rocket Lab's Puma vehicle, which sensed the threat and fired thrusters to "vanish into the dark."
"Jackal's crew produced a validated mission plan in under 30 minutes from tasking," True Anomaly said in a statement. "Jackal executed ingress and a burn sequence over 23 minutes to close on Puma. When Puma maneuvered away during the approach, Jackal downlinked what it saw, and our team replanned, revalidated, and implemented a new mission plan in rapid succession."
As Rocket Lab's Puma backed away, True Anomaly's Jackal executed more burns to reengage and image its prey. Military and company officials haven't released any photos from the most recent Victus Haze demo, and they declined to disclose exactly how close the satellites came to one another.
"Due to operational security, further details involving sensor suites for characterization, phenomenology, payloads, distances, or docking will not be shared," a spokesperson for Space Systems Command said in response to questions from Ars.
True Anomaly's ground controllers, working out of an operations center in Colorado, managed the maneuvers with the help of an algorithm generating "hyper-accurate" targeting estimates from measurements onboard the Jackal satellite. All of this was done without coordination between True Anomaly and Rocket Lab. "No scripted target behavior," True Anomaly said.
"Puma wasn't playing a role," the company continued. "It was maneuvering to lose us, and we didn't know how in advance. That's the entire reason to do this on orbit instead of in a lab: the human decisions, the unexpected conditions, and the adversary's freedom to act are all real, and integration that hasn't held up against them hasn't been tested at all."
This cat-and-mouse game sounds a lot like dogfighting in space, something Rogers, who started True Anomaly in 2022, has discussed with Ars in the past. Rogers previously served in a space aggressors unit in the US Air Force, taking up against US space operators in war game and military exercises.
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