The Russians launched the Sputnik satellite into space in 1957 and since then, the number of objects orbiting Earth has steadily risen. As of 2016, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) officials in charge of keeping track estimate that there are about 23,000 objects, with only 17,000 of them in the catalog.
The rest are simply “analyst records,” or things that don’t match with any known object in space, according to USAF spokesman Capt. Nicholas Mercurio. A lot of them, Mercurio said, are old spare parts just free-floating in space.
This is a problem, according to Navy Rear Admiral Brian Brown, the deputy commander for Joint Functional Component Command for Space (JFCC Space), who visited the Cal Poly CubeSat Lab April 1. Brown is the second-in-command at JFCC Space, the military command tasked with tracking objects in space that is headquartered at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The visit to the lab was his first since assuming the position as JFCC Space deputy commander in 2014.
The meeting can be described as, among many things, a continued partnership between Vandenberg and Cal Poly to keep track of all of the stuff floating just beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
To do this, Brown wants to enlist the help of Cal Poly professor Jordi Puig-Suari and the students of the CubeSat lab. The lab develops a miniaturized type of satellite called a CubeSat.
CubeSats are basically nanosatellites; they’re small, cubelike or rectangular in shape, usually weigh less than 10 pounds, and can be held with one or two hands. They’re armed with sensors and cameras and are small enough that several of them can be launched at once. They have many functions, from commercial to academic.
Puig-Suari, along with Stanford’s Bob Twiggs, invented the satellites in 1999 and they’ve quickly become a cost-effective standard for other countries, organizations, or even individuals to put satellites in space.
The objects that organizations are putting into space are getting smaller and harder to track, according to Brown, and the tens of thousands of these objects is only expected to double, or even triple, in the next five years.
Brown said his command is only able to track an object the size of a CubeSat or larger.
“More payloads that stop operating in space become space junk and you have to deal with those,” Brown said. “Smaller things in space mean harder to track.”
To track objects close to Earth, JFCC uses alphanumeric codes assigned to each object. According to Brown, the code indicates the position of the object and where it’s headed.
According to Cal Poly’s Puig-Suari, these coordinates are critical and we shouldn’t take them for granted.
“Somebody has to put them there,” Puig-Suari said. “And that was one of things where we started really realizing that we needed to work closer with JFCC.”
Vandenberg partners with many commercial and academic organizations for its missions, but the one at Cal Poly is special.
Cal Poly and Vandenberg’s relationship is well established. With the help of heavy rockets at Vandenberg, Puig-Suari has been launching CubeSats into space for years. In 2013, Puig-Suari and the students launched its IPEX (Intelligent Payload Experiment) into space, along with a fleet of 11 other CubeSats from various organizations.
At the CubeSat lab, Puig-Suari and his students develop satellites such as the IPEX, which transmits pictures of the surface of the Earth from a series of low-resolution cameras (about three megapixels) attached to it; and the ExoCube, which measured the density of the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere. The satellites are monitored from the CubeSat lab.
At the press conference following the April 1 visit, Brown said tracking space objects is a matter of security. Whether we like it or not, space affects what we do on Earth, Brown said. GPS systems, satellite TV, and ATMs all use satellites to function, so people on the ground are tied to what’s beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
“Part of that job, to keep the DoD [Department of Defense] space mission running right, is to actually look at the entire domain and make sure that the entire domain is safe,” Brown said.
The Cal Poly and Vandenberg partnership is a renewed relationship that Brown said was a long time coming.
Staff Writer David Minsky can be reached at dminsky@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 14-21, 2016.