Space Situational Awareness Sensor Tasking: A Comparison Between Step-Scan Tasking and Dynamic, Real-Time Tasking

Modern societies rely on space assets for a number of critical tasks, including communications, imagery, and position, navigation and timing. The interference or collision of these space assets with another orbiting object has the potential to be catastrophic. Tracking orbiting objects, known as Space Situational Awareness (SSA), is of paramount importance to ensure such events do not occur. With the number of objects orbiting Earth growing disproportionately to the number of sensors used to detect them, allocating sensor resources efficiently is becoming increasingly more important. Typically, SSA sensors are step-scanned across a region of interest in the sky to produce detections. No information about the tracked object's uncertainty, future viewing opportunity or changes in environment is used to direct the sensor, resulting in a poor utilisation of sensor resources. Tracker of Things in Space (TOTIS) was built to task, in real time, its associated sensors using information from its space object catalogue. This allows for TOTIS to react to changes in operating environment and independently manage uncertainty of all tracked objects. This produces a more efficient allocation of sensor resources. This paper presents a comparison study between the traditional step-scan tasking methodology and the methodology employed in TOTIS.