Data solution Space Situational Awareness SSA SDA

Our Space Data Service: Space Situational Awareness

Beyond Gravity offers an innovative Space Situational Awareness (SSA) solution. This service, leverages over six years of data collection. It offers unparalleled accuracy and insights into more than 10,000 active satellites. The Space Situational Awareness solution enhances faster decision-making for institutional and commercial customers alike.

What is Space Situational Awareness (SSA)?

Space Situational Awareness (SSA) is the knowledge of the space domain close to Earth. SSA includes the ability to monitor, track, and predict the location and behaviour of natural and artificial objects. SSA is essential to ensure the safety, security, and sustainability of space activities. It does so by avoiding collisions, reporting interference, or predicting unexpected events for example. SSA services may include satellite tracking, space surveillance, satellite overflight, orbital awareness, object catalogue, debris analysis, conjunction analysis, or satellite integrity monitoring, amongst many other activities. In short, SSA enables actors to engage in decision-making and to perform actions based on tangible in-orbit related intelligence.

Data aggregation, machine learning and artificial Intelligence

SSA has been relying on a vast array of sensors that use radar, imagery, or signal intelligence around the globe, and since recent years in-orbit too. This plurality of sensors created a paradigm shift: Data aggregation, machine learning (ML) and artificial Intelligence (AI) are becoming essential in delivering accurate and precise intelligence built on a growing pool of dataset. Thanks to this, SSA related products can be delivered without the need to own physical assets. This allows agile companies, such as startups or spinoffs, to quickly identify and deliver novel solutions with minimum fundings.

Satellite Space Situational Awareness tracker radar SSA difference to SDA

What is the difference between SSA and SDA?

Here is how we explain the difference between SSA and SDA. The Space Domain Awareness (SDA) is a larger construct. SDA covers a wider range of SSA activities, that go beyond the limitations of Situational Awareness and cover additional components, networks of systems of systems, space weather, or Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST). Since 2019, the United States Space Command exclusively uses the term SDA.

Novel SSA solutions from private actors

Until recently, Space Situational Awareness (SSA) was primarily performed by governmental and military agencies. Since around 2015, with the advent of the New Space, more private actors have been taking ownership of this topic and deliver commercial SSA solutions. These novel SSA solutions are driven by the reduction of barriers to entry and the multiplication of data ecosystems needed to perform SSA related analysis. Agencies such as the United States Space Surveillance Network (SSN), the European Space Agency (ESA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), or some of the thousands of satellites operators’ companies and agencies rely on Space Situational Awareness providers.

Typically, Space Situational Awareness solutions provides the following:

Satellite Tracking: real-time updates on satellite positions, orbits, and manoeuvres. Chart the present position of space objects and plot their anticipated orbital paths.
Space Surveillance: map and monitor debris and objects of all dimensions to prevent collisions.
Space Overflight: discover details about orbital flyovers and their implications for other actors’ operations.
Tracking of re-entry: predict when and where a decaying space object will re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere.
Detect and catalogue new objects across the near-earth orbits.
Orbital Awareness: complete view of the orbits.

To learn more about the Space Situational Awareness solution from Beyond Gravity, visit this page.