Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated 1 November 2010, was produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It describes nanosatellite technologies and proposes launching nanosats into orbit with laser Lightcraft propulsion. It also covers a weapon mission selection study and multi-megawatt laser options. The author recommends that the Department of Defense and NASA bring Lightcraft R&D back to the United States and restart the X-50LR flight demonstration program.
“beam of light”10 pages
UNCLASSIFIED//P8"1 8PPll!l"'I! l!l!il! 8111!¥ associated with a particular nanosat. Constellations that fly in close formation can benefit by the use of inter-nanosat communications to reduce ground station contention. The data would flow from a single nanosat to the ground instead of coming from every nanosat. Communications protocols for inter-nanosat communications must be developed. AUTONOMY Support costs are high if single-satellite mission operations and data analysis practices are scaled to a constellation mission. Autonomy onboard the spacecraft and on the ground is therefore required to ensure that mission objectives are efficiently and inexpensively met. Nanosat autonomy will make use of on board and ground-based remote agents with the overarching goal of maximizing the scientific or intelligence return from each nanosat during the mission lifetime. The remote agents achieve this goal by monitoring and appropriately controlling nanosat subsystems. Additionally, the onboard agent monitors the full complement of spacecraft sensors and instruments to heuristically separate scientific or intelligence events of interest from background events, thereby intelligently fitting the science/intelligence data within allocated spacecraft storage resources. Nanosats with distant orbits are out of communications range of a ground station for nearly a week. Nanosat subsystems could be compromised if faults occurring during this blackout period were not readily addressed. An unacceptable loss of scientific or intelligence data could also occur. Therefore, the onboard agent will incorporate the capability to detect, diagnose, and recover from faults. Certain failure scenarios may not be correctable by the onboard agent. These faults will be deferred to the ground agent for handling. Each nanosat will include data in its telemetry on the health and status of each subsystem and a history of commands autonomously issued since the last ground contact. The ground system will then attempt to diagnose problems based on this data. Additionally, collective knowledge of actions taken by all nanosats in the constellation will reside within the ground system by virtue of the data dumps made during each contact. From this data the agent can detect trends and systematic conditions not otherwise observable onboard the nanosat. These highly autonomous systems will present a unique set of challenges not only to the system designers, but also to those involved in spacecraft testing. Careful consideration must be given to the design of the test program to ensure that the state- space of the remote agents is validated and verified. It is equally important to implement this program in a cost-effective manner. However, we could likely justify deploying considerable resources to address this issue since the methods developed to solve these challenges can be applied to numerous missions. 10 UNCLASSIFIED/ /1"91t 91"1"1!1"'1! l!l91!! 9111:Y
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 77 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.