AIR FORCE STEPS UP SATELLITE AND SPACE-ASSET PROTECTION RESEARCH
Developments in space technologies that will improve satellite communications and protect U.S. space assets are among primary research areas that Air Force Office of Scientific Research (OSR) intends to pursue. OSR, which manages bulk of agency’s research investments, recently unveiled plan that seeks to include participation of industry and academia in attaining such technological advances. It said it would sponsor those and other communications and information technology research projects to enable “Air Force and U.S. industry to produce world-class, militarily significant and commercially valuable products.”
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Communications and IT subject areas include R&D that will produce advances in “extremely high bandwidth” satellite signal-processing capabilities as well as developments in spacecraft sensors and structures. Agency has particular interest in learning more about electromagnetic characteristics of space. It will fund experiments that could help U.S. forces “probe and exploit the space environment” such as harnessing space energy to maximize performance of communications systems and sensors.
Air Force expects that greater understanding of space environment, combined with advances in optoelectronics, eventually will bolster its space-based ability to store and transmit data “of magnitude larger than current system capabilities.” Such developments would ensure “wide bandwidth communications through the atmosphere and ionosphere as well as between satellites,” it said. Significant advances in compound semiconductors and optoelectronics also would enhance agency’s role in space- asset protection and monitoring, it said.
Air Force signals communications & surveillance program will focus on detection of unique characteristics embedded within radiofrequencies and media transmissions. Development of “sophisticated mathematical methods” to enhance its ability to interpret and use data is high priority for program, it said: “These methods hold promise… in the synthesis of hard-to-intercept communications links and the achievement of faithful compression and fast reconstruction for audio and video links.”