Airborne MASINT Mission Planner (AMMP)
Adam Krause, ITT Space Systems Division
Produced for the U.S. government, the Airborne MASINT Mission Planner (AMMP) is the key mission planning and integration tool for an operational, multi-sensor ISR aircraft. AMMP manages the numerous performance variables and constraints of the aircraft, its sensors, and the environment to produce optimized waypoints via a customized, user-friendly workflow. These waypoints are fed directly to the sensor control systems, the sensor planners, and the flight crew for more efficient and effective intelligence collection, reducing mission planning workloads from days to a few hours, and providing the capability to substantially increase sensor performance. Developed to augment existing sensor planning software, AMMP provides a more flexible "plug-and-play" integration architecture that can be easily expanded and adapted to meet users’ specific needs, while at the same time retaining a very capable and robust modeling environment. Leveraging AGI’s 4DX (STK Engine) technology and user-oriented interfaces, AMMP enables precise control of optimization variables and output of ready-to-use operational products, compatible with numerable disparate sensors, GPS units, navigation equipment, and other military and commercial mission planning formats, such as FalconView and Jeppesen. This ability to combine incongruent and independent product formats not only saves valuable planning time, but can directly improve sensor performance, maximizing the customer’s investment.

Hosted on a ruggedized laptop and integrated with multiple GPS units, AMMP also provides the user a complete, turn-key in-flight visualization and mission guidance capability, as well as a pre- and post-flight pilot and mission commander briefing product. Via the AMMP interface, operators receive a 3-D visual presentation of the aircraft and its sensor coverage in planning or execution mode. Here, the user can see the targets, waypoints, and mission environment all in context with one another. Additionally, the user can overlay charts, 3-D terrain, imagery, and weather data, providing a true GIS interface. Finally, unlike an off-the-shelf GIS product, the customized workspace allows the capability to have environmental variables, such as terrain features, weather data, and GPS constellation coverage, directly constrain and affect the mission optimization routines, in addition to simply visualizing them. Finally, via easily compatible AGI Viewer VDF files, videos, and other outputs, AMMP serves as the key operational record and briefing medium for not only mission personnel, but program managers and decision makers as well.

Streamlining TGRS/IIP Modeling for Launch Range Safety using AGI Components
Dr. Tom Lovern, SAIC
The System Test and Evaluation Performance Analysis Lab (STEPAL) in Huntsville, Alabama, provides GPS system performance predictions to Range Safety at Vandenberg Air Force Base in support of GMD/MDA missile defense tests. Advanced planning data packages on GPS constellation availability, positional accuracy, and projected IIP errors are developed using a custom application and process developed using the new AGI Components in conjunction with Navigation Tool Kit (NavTK) and STK. The challenges are to develop an integrated process that yields accurate results, and then to make that process run for many thousands of iterations for analysis of launch windows. As AGI Components mature and more features from NavTK and STK are added to the component libraries, we have expanded the functionality of our custom application. An overview of the process and our application is presented.

JC2Sat Mission Design Using STK
Alfred Ng, Canadian Space Agency
Japan Canada Joint Collaboration Satellite (JC2Sat) is a joint project between JAXA and CSA with the end goal of building, launching, and operating two 20 kg nanosatellites for technical demonstration of formation flying using differential drag technique, relative navigation using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) dual band GPS receivers, and far infra-red radiance measurement. This project started off as a joint research project between JAXA and CSA engineers in April 2006 and evolved quickly into an approved project by senior management on both sides in July 2007.

The two satellites are stacked in launch configuration and will be separated in space after the initial checkout operation. Both JAXA and CSA engineers brought to the project their own prior experience in domestic small and microsatellite development. One of the goals of the project is to develop a highly capable nanosatellite platform at low cost through extensive use of COTS) components, small teams, and short development time.

In developing the mission, STK plays an important role. The software is first used to validate the theoretical calculations on the maximum differential drag possible and the minimum size of drag panels. Using STK/Astrogator, high-fidelity simulations were generated. To determine the impact of dispersion error on the differential drag, a MATLAB script was generated which, through the STK/MATLAB Interface module, creates a Monte Carlo simulation to determine the maximum differential drag. This exercise proves to have a tremendous impact on the mission; it determines that the dispersion error has an influence of an order of magnitude on the maximum differential drag.

HOPE – Hybrid Operational Protocol Evaluation Tool Summary
Alexey Rudenko, Booz Allen Hamilton
Designing a distributed mobile communication architecture, which may involve hundreds of mobile nodes, requires the evaluation of various communication protocols. In order to select the appropriate protocol, each protocol’s performance should be compared across realistic missions with different traffic profiles, terrain, and atmospheric conditions.

The Hybrid Operational Protocol Evaluation (HOPE) tool is a framework that combines models of communication protocols, terrain maps, link budget calculations, scenario visualization, and statistics gathering and reporting. The HOPE simulation configuration user interface allows a user to easily create a scenario by defining:

1. Number of vehicles onto a 3D geographical map
2. Vehicle source and destination and character of motion
3. Communication traffic profile
4. Communications parameters for a vehicle’s communication equipment
5. Atmospheric conditions

To ensure realism in urban environments, HOPE extracts road coordinates from Google Maps Web service and overlays them on 3-D maps to ensure vehicles follow roads. HOPE leverages map, terrain, atmospheric and building data embedded into STK to calculate link budgets. This data is fed back to the simulation environment (the current prototype uses QualNet), which determines the impact to the communications protocol. Using STK, HOPE animates the scenario, showing vehicle motion, closed links between nodes over a 3D map, and charts performance metrics.

The HOPE tool’s framework allows communications protocol models from various simulation tools (such as OPNET, QualNet, MATLAB, or STK) to be visualized on one user interface. This approach allows not only the evaluation of communication protocols, but also mission scenarios, the task that involves mission resource expense monitoring.

Optical Observations of Space Debris with MODEST
Patrick Seitzer, University of Michigan
Since the beginning of the space age, non-functioning objects constitute a significant fraction of the population of artificial objects in Earth orbit. NASA is supporting an optical survey for such debris at geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) using MODEST (the Michigan Orbital DEbris Survey Telescope, the University of Michigan’s 0.6/0.9-m Schmidt telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile). I’ll present a brief review of how the survey is conducted, and what some of the significant results encompass. The goal is to characterize the population of debris objects at GEO, with emphasis on the faint object population.

Because the survey observations extend over a very short arc (5 minutes), a full six parameter orbit can not be determined. Recently we have begun to use a second telescope, the 0.9-m at CTIO, as a ‘chase’ telescope to do follow-up observations of potential GEO debris candidates found by MODEST. With a long enough sequence of observations, a full six-parameter orbit including eccentricity can be determined.

The project has used STK since inception for planning observing sessions based on the distribution of bright cataloged objects and the anti-solar point (to avoid eclipse). Recently, AGI’s Orbit Determination Tool Kit (ODTK) has been used to determine orbits, including the effects of solar radiation pressure. Since an unknown fraction of the faint debris at GEO has a high area-to-mass ratio (A/M), the orbits are perturbed significantly by solar radiation. The ODTK analysis results indicate that temporal variations in the solar perturbations, possibly due to debris orientation dynamics, can be estimated in the OD process. Additionally, the best results appear to be achieved when solar forces orthogonal to the object-Sun line are considered. Determining the A/M of individual objects and the distribution of A/M values of a large sample of debris is important to understanding the total population of debris at GEO. This work is supported by NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office, Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX.

Massively Scalable Analytical Systems for Navigation and Space Superiority
Appistr, Appistry
AGI and Appistry have partnered to allow custom and COTS applications based on AGI’s Dynamic Geometry Library to be easily scaled to meet the real-time needs of advanced navigation and space superiority applications. This presentation outlines the challenges faced by today’s defense, intelligence, and space communities which demand a highly scalable grid-based approach such as that provided by Appistry. The advantages of grid-based platforms are reviewed, with a focus on how they help customers achieve scalability for compute- and data-intensive applications such as those provided by AGI. A review of the architectural and deployment model for these applications is presented in detail, and it is shown how this architecture can be extended to accelerate a wide variety of analytical applications. This presentation provides detailed examples based on the author’s experience developing and delivering applications based on the Dynamic Geometry Library and other AGI technologies.