Researchers from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory discuss their ongoing space research and development efforts. Topics include the development of GPS technology, space mission support capability, the study of space plasmas, free space optics, space weather research, research on sungrazing comets, and NRL’s Blossom Point tracking facility.

Transcript

Music At the NCST which is the Naval Center for Space Technology at NRL, we are looking at advanced communication techniques for ISR, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. At the same time we are doing work on autonomy and robotics and being able to do some of these things autonomously as the problem set changes and the adversary changes. The basic fundamental research has to be done to stay abreast of that and be able to make sure the Navy has that technical edge going forward. NRL’s history with GPS started well before there was a GPS. Back in the late 50’s on the Vanguard program where Roger Easton developed a system that was going to be used to track Vanguard and was used to track Vanguard as well as Sputnik. He started to figuring you could take clocks and put them in orbit and use those satellites to provide positioning and navigation and timing services on the ground. So, he filed the first patent through NRL before the technologies eventually became GPS. A lot of the other work that NRL did made GPS look like what it does today. VMOC which stands for the virtual mission operation center is a web-based mission management application and the idea behind it is to provide a common set of features that space missions need in order to maintain their satellite once it’s in orbit. Specifically, it provides scheduling capabilities and these mission schedules help support the warfighter by making it possible for satellites to provide things like battle space awareness, technical intelligence or just any kind of general mission support. When you think of space research at NRL there are really three major components. There is experimentation that is done in space or ground based experiments like high power radio waves etcetera. There is theory and modeling where theorists try to understand observations made by the space experimentalists or make predictions about what is going to be measured. And, there is computation modeling that goes along with that. But, our part of this research is to do laboratory validation with real plasma where we can scale the conditions to what they see in space and then test the theory and modeling to try to benchmark it so it can be applied to space results with greater confidence. The primary focus of free space optics has been to develop resilient communications systems for different regimes of communications. Be it land, sea, airborne and space. And, a lot of our focus here has been on developing resiliency at the communications level as lasers propagate through the atmosphere they suffer from assimilation and fades and so we’ve developed test beds, tool sets and systems that mitigate the impact of the atmosphere on the optical channel. The Navy has to have an understanding of the environment it operates in. You have to be able to predict it, you have to be able to model it, exploit it, hide in it. And, in order to do that you have an understanding of that. The sun drives the weather on the earth. It is all driven by the sun at the end of the day. So, while we have gotten really good at at the last century or so in forecasting what the weather will be like here on the ground. We are not very good at forecasting what space weather is going to be like in the next day or two days or three days. It basically involves raising up the high altitudes of the currently existing operational weather forecasting models. So, I work with weather in the upper atmosphere. Your day-to-day you want to know what your weather is doing down in the lower atmosphere for a number of different. For what to wear, what you are going to do later, all of those different things. And, that’s what we focused on in the upper atmosphere. We want to know types of things. We want to know the temperature. We want to know the winds. We want to know the density. All of these things affect where your satellite is at any one point and time. Whether or not you will be able to talk to another satellite or another ship. Specifically, we do this using the same types of instruments that are used in the lower atmosphere. Namely modeling. One of the projects here that we have worked on and continue to work on and develop is a whole atmosphere model called Neptune that will go from the ground to space not only predicting lower atmosphere weather but upper atmosphere weather. So, the Sun Grazer project is remarkable in a number of ways. I think the most amazing aspects of it is that to date we’ve discovered over three thousand six hundred new comets near the sun. And, just to kind of put that into perspective throughout history we’ve only got around I think two and half to three thousand comets on record other than the SOHO ones. So, basically SOHO has more than double the number of know comets in history just in the past twenty or so years of observation from that spacecraft. I’ve been working the spacecraft engineering department and our mission is to boldly fly what never has flown before. And, we do that in many areas. Whether it’s the transmission of energy, power beaming, whether it’s space robotics, whether it’s any of a range of different technologies for thermal control for propulsion. We have been on the forefront of investigating new technologies and figuring out what makes sense and what needs to be developed further and what will serve our country. So, being able to do satellite command and control is important not just for the Navy and Marine Corp but for the entirety of the Department of Defense. Obviously, being able to talk to troops in the field for them to be able to talk to one another and be able to receive new orders or new intelligence that’s how we get the job done. For the Navy and Marine Corps in particular where it’s not like you can run a long line from ship back to shore to be able to receive your latest internet updates or whatever else it is you need to accomplish the mission. So, having that ability to look up at the heavens connect with a satellite is that much more imperative. Today, NRL is the only place in the DOD and one of the few places left in the nation that can do a conceive, design, build, assemble, integrate, test and operate spacecraft all from a single roof. We have antennas in the U.S. and around the globe to be able to do that. The system that we try to conceive, design, build and operate have to be breaking new ground. There is new knowledge that has to be implemented and put into operational use and we put that on a space-based platform.