Organizers are practicing satellite collection with military exercises to improve their data analysis – such as the RIMPAC sea exercise outlined during the virtual Small Satellite Conference running this week.
In a pre-recorded video available on the conference website, U.S. military officials described the partial success of a Hybrid Satellite Architecture (HSA). The architecture used a combination of satellites and ground assets to pick up ship activities during an international maritime warfare exercise that took place last year – an exercise that included Canadian participation.
It appears that coordinating activities among multiple satellites and ships will be among the chief challenges of international allies working together to figure out a swiftly evolving wartime effort, based on how HSA performed. That said, the conference presentation pointed to ongoing improvements in machine learning that is making it easier to pick up valuable data and to analyze it quickly, which may lead to more improvements for future exercises.
The exercise under consideration was RIMPAC 2020, also known as the Rim of the Pacific Exercise. It is held every two years among the United States and its Pacific Rim allies, including Canada. A 2020 press release from the U.S. Navy notes there are multiple objectives to the biannual exercise, including training, improving interoperability and readiness, and otherwise preparing a multinational force to “deter and defeat aggression” those allies may face.
Notably, some modifications were made to the 2020 iteration due to the ongoing pandemic – such as minimizing troop interactions on-shore – but overall RIMPAC 2020 was able to proceed. (That said, one of the eight HSA objectives could not be realized due to the pandemic, as will be explained below.)
For 2020, Canada’s notable personnel and equipment contributions include two Sikorsky CH-148 Cyclone helicopters and their crew, as well as roughly 500 personnel on board HMC Ships Regina and Winnipeg, to complete the two-week exercise. (The satellite contributions under HSA will be outlined below.)
“The Americans have some of the best live-fire ranges in the world, so we were actually able to do gunnery and fire weapons systems in a safe environment,” said Capt. Scott Robinson, RIMPAC task group commander for Canada, in a summary Government of Canada video of the exercise posted Sept. 2, 2020. The assembled forces, he added, “were able to do the core warfare skills that they’re expected to do day-in and day-out on operations, so that was probably the biggest satisfier we had out of this exercise.”
While the bulk of the RIMPAC 2020 attention was focused at sea, however, Canada was also careful to highlight its space contributions to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and other projects in its departmental plan 2021-22 that discussed RIMPAC 2020 and other activities.
Like the U.S., Canada is working to integrate its military capabilities across multiple domains – listed as naval, land, air, space, cyber and special operations in the document – to meet “force posture and readiness levels.” Among other activities listed in the departmental plan, the Canadian Space Operations Centre will continue testing and fielding an “interoperable C2 [command and control] system” in support and defence of space capabilities for Canada’s defence policy, the document notes.
On the U.S. side, the conference presentation – delivered by Charlene Jacka, branch chief engineer of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) – described a hybrid space architecture (HSA) meant to include a constellation of government-owned satellites (both military and civil), along with commercial and “allied” vehicles. An exercise of this HSA done at RIMPAC was meant to be a science and technology demonstration to figure out capabilities and challenges, based on the performance in the exercise and feedback from users, Jacka said in the presentation.
A coalition of participants under the Micro-Satellite Military Utility project – including Canada’s Radarsat Constellation Mission managed by MDA, Waterloo, Ont.’s Maerospace (which focuses on maritime intelligence) and Planet Labs’ SkySats that had both Canadian and U.S. participation – aimed to use everything from data to planning to enterprise tools for the exercise, Jacka said. Canadians were involved in the providing data (space and ground) and planning tools.
Jacka then ran through the eight objectives of the 2020 exercise and how well the HSA performed. HSA was partially successfully overall due to numerous factors, including technical matters and halting certain activities due to the pandemic. Briefly, this is how HSA did, according to Jacka.
- Objective 1 – Realized: HSA was able to perform “automated monitoring of military activities in a defined static target area”, including aspects such as life determination.
- Objective 2 – Realized: HSA successfully used automated site monitoring and deep learning to detect and classify aircraft, along with monitoring airfields.
- Objective 3 – Not realized: A battle damage assessment vignette was not realized, after attempts to collect information using multiple Earth observation satellites, synthetic aperture radar platforms from orbit, and automatic identification system (AIS) on board ships. (Jacka pointed to “limited collaboration opportunities” as a leading cause.)
- Objective 4 – Partially realized: The team was partially able to understand how to use AIS data for “real time anomaly detection,” such as monitoring close interactions between ships. (Jacka said there were issues with timing during a small window of opportunity.)
- Objective 5 – Realized: Calculating dynamic trajectories was realized using “multi-int”, or bringing together different technical collection types such as imagery and signals.
- Objective 6 – Did not happen: COVID-19 resulted in a decision to shut down an exercise to see how well HSA could track and maintain custody of a fleet of ships while they were moving between California and Hawaii.
- Objective 7 – Partially realized. HSA was partially successful in detecting and tracking simulated “dark” vessels, typically meaning ships that attempt to elude detection by travelling without industry-mandated AIS. (Jacka said the satellite collection of data did not completely coincide with the movements of the ships.)
- Objective 8 – Realized. HSA used semi-automated mission planning to try to reduce the time to plan data collections, Jacka said, such as during the standard “Tasking, Collection, Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination” process.
Overall, Jacka said, HSA “demonstrates the potential impact of solutions that enhance” the ability of the system to address what warfighters will need to make choices in the field. It will be interesting to see how future generations of satellites perform during the next probable RIMPAC exercise in 2022.
