It has been a couple of years since officials from Vandenberg, Air Force Base came up to Cal Poly SLO to check out what the folks at PolySat have been up too.
Suffice to say, the Top Brass at the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) are still very interested in what the academics have been working on, especially when it comes to how to better track the cubesats (10 cm cube mini-satellites) that were pioneered at the school.
On April 1, the DOD sent Navy Rear Adm. Brian Brown, a two-star admiral, and their deputy commander of Joint Functional Component Command for Space, along with an Air Force officer entourage from JFCC Space’s Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) to tour the PolySat labs on the SLO campus.
An educational visit, with more key, “partnership building,” meetings taking place off-camera, the Rear Adm. noted that the smartphone revolution had allowed much of the bulky technology he worked with as an oceanographer “looking down” to now be lofted skyward “looking up” in small packages.
“Miniaturization is necessary, but it brings challenges,” said Brown after touring the clean room and computer lab at Cal Poly that house the PolySat and CubeSat effort.
He noted the issue of lack in cube-sat maneuverability and the fact that the 10 cm cube threshold is about as small as the JsPOC can track.
Those points are important, as Capt. Nick Mercurio, director of JFCC Space Public Affairs, explained ahead of the event, JSpOC is a synergistic Command and Control center, doing their best to track every single man made object in orbit.
“We’re protecting space for everyone, worldwide,” he said. “from right here at Vandenberg and the Central Coast.”
In layman’s terms, they track everything their global network of telescopes and radar faculties are capable of getting data on and extrapolate the flight paths.
When a possible collision is detected, they work with satellite operators (I.E Cal Poly or independent companies) to calculate possible maneuvers and avoid an incident. In short, they’re traffic controllers for low Earth orbit, but with a lot more paperwork.
While airplanes have been required to carry transponders for decades, the mini-satellites Cal Poly sends up are not required to help others track their progress. They’ve always found it advantageous to do so however, if not only for the benefit that JspOC provides in planning, then for pubic affairs and scientific purposes. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, better known as an inventory tracking system or Wal-Mart and Target or for government use in passports, are now being mounted on cubesats as a means to identify the mini-systems in orbit.
While those systems are all short range, as Justin Foley, CubeSat systems engineer at Cal Poly explained tongue in cheek, “you can do anything with a big enough antenna.”
According to their statistics before the tour, JsPOC monitors some 23,000 objects orbiting the Earth, which include a growing number of cubesats. Cal Poly Professor Jordi Puig-Suari who started the CubeSat/ Poly Sat effort a little over 16 years ago, noted that he’d never imagined the program could grow so large, encompassing approximately 100 university relationships and several commercial companies involved in launching the devices.
In the future, technicl applications involving “clouds” of cubesats, could become reality, with a little more system interconnectivity. At the moment the devices are being prepped for launch with sensors recording data from inside their launch vehicles the whole way up. That breaks from tradition as most are tested and launched with power off on the ground and deployed when they reach orbit or suborbital trajectories.
Students explained to the Rear Adm. how some of those projects are being tested, with Wi-Fi connections between paired satellites being launched on the same vehicle. Many test modules are themselves taken up as secondary cargo of rockets launched from Vandenberg.
Brown, as well as members of his staff, held the famous P-Pod, a device designed at Cal Poly, that releases three cubesats into orbit, while Puig-Suari explained the mechanism’s exact function.
The primary function of the frames is to hold the satellites for release without sending them burning into the either them at the wrong time; the secondary objective is to actually deploy them.
For Brown, balancing space between the multi-billion dollar plans of government programs and, what he said, were 17,000 objects that the agency tracks, entering and leaving orbit is a tricky game. By the initial indications he’s not looking to crowd out civilian use.
“I’m a technology nerd,” he said, “I’ve been looking at these models [of cubesats] for a number of years now…these are finally leaving the labs to really kick off LTE services.”
LTE stands for Long-Term Evolution, commonly marketed as 4G LTE, a standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones.
Some private companies have already started selling cubesat services with onboard camera, in much the same way that private drone operators take photos below the clouds. Part of what officialdom will keep looking to the academics for are ways to ensure a smooth transition as devices become more capable and useful.
“Space itself reaches every aspect of everyone’s lives whether they se it or not right now,” said Brown. “Our job is to look after that entire domain.”