Developing a Prototype Ground Station for the Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination of pLEO Sensor Data

The Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) recently executed a quick-turnaround (16 month) effort through the Defense Innovation Unit to develop a prototype ground architecture demonstrating low-latency processing, exploitation, and dissemination of data collected by notional multi-phenomenology sensors hosted on small satellites in a proliferated LEO constellation. This effort, led by the Southwest Research Institute and supported by teammates, Amazon Web Services, SpaceX, and SciTec, Inc., involved the modeling and simulation of a variety of different OPIR, EO/IR, and SAR data streams; transporting these data via space and ground networks; processing the data in the AWS cloud environment; and then disseminating resulting products to tactical users. In this paper, we present an overview of the data transport and mission data processing, performance results from the application of our various Mission Data Processing Chains, a summary of our findings on the latencies associated with both data transport and data processing, and lessons learned including insight into ground-based vs. on-board processing.