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Today, we have a little treat because John Sharifs, we talked yesterday about the central role of space domain awareness in future,

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the conflict springboard about him in 2018,

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perhaps dissatisfied with the way the world is so designed to find his own space consultancy company, which is SJC Space Limited.

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They walked up to the Amsterdam thank you after spending 16 years with the mission to here, the UK 14 years.

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We're going to get the talk right. Surrey Satellite Technology limited capacity out his works in a variety of capacities,

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but the most important are that he has been vocal in certain space missions,

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including some of the satellite world record for resolution maps was launched in 2005, which was featured in Space Gallery Science Museum in London.

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His recent book, Space Traffic Control,

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describes the measures needed to maintain the space environment and protect satellites from natural hazards and,

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crucially, grant discussions via manmade threats.

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He serves on the Imposer Panel for the IEEE as a Space Safety Programme founder of Genesis that network on sustainability in space.

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It involved a diverse range of meteorite scientists. She's been talking about all aspects of space.

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Even most recently this essay Wolf I was going to hear about today.

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It's previously been a recipient of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Space Education and Outreach.

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Oxygen was in college. I taught her for 10 years.

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We don't. We talk about a entrepreneur. Fantastic race was a great friend.

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Sure, it has an embassy in astrophysics and a Ph.D. in Satellite Constellation Design and has been a

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fellow at the Royal Astronomical Society and the British Interplanetary Society for 25 years.

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Sure. Thank you very, very much indeed for coming to space situational awareness.

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Thank you very much indeed. Good afternoon, everybody.

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So I was invited to put together a paper on this topic for the Freeman Institute, which is a spin off from King's College in London,

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and I received quite a number of invitations as a result, one of which was from Rob to come and talk to you this afternoon.

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So the phrase space situational awareness is a term that's been around for quite a while.

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It's basically how do we figure out what's going on in Earth orbit?

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And it refers particularly to the manmade stuff that's up there.

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The US have recently started using a phrase space domain awareness, which I think is intended to be slightly broader,

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and it's intended to include the natural space environment, i.e. stuff that the Sun is doing, etc.

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I'm going to stick to space situational awareness largely today because I'm going to be talking about the manmade stuff that's going on up there,

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that deliberate and military things that are happening in space and particularly.

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I'm going to talk to the issue of how space is being militarised and things are starting to change in space.

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Satellites are now potentially going to need design features that more conventional

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weapons systems like aircraft and and ships and land vehicles have had for a long time.

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Spacecraft historically hadn't been equipped with those things, but I hope to convince you this afternoon that they really need to be.

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So I wanted to start with an analogy so we can have a debate about the first

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bullet about exactly when the air domain became pretty central to winning wars.

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But I think after the Second World War, it became generally acknowledged that aircraft were really important.

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Air superiority was a thing during the war.

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Aircraft were targeted with relatively unsophisticated weapons systems like flak,

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and they dropped chaff in order to try and confuse the radars that were trying to get a lock on them.

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Over time, people developed surface to air and air to air missiles became a lot better at killing aircraft,

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and as a result, aircraft started to develop fairly sophisticated decoy systems.

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They went for stealth technology. They went for radar absorbent absorbing materials.

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They developed things like emissions control.

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So they did turn off their radios when they go into conflict situations, so they're not providing a signature for the enemy to use against them.

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And my analogy is that I think all of these things are increasingly true for the space domain.

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So since the time of probably the first Gulf War in about 1990 or thereabouts, satellites have become pretty central to war winning.

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They satellites have definitely become the targets of increasingly sophisticated weapons systems and.

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We have seen over the weekend the Russians have tested an HD satellite weapon and blown up one of their old defunct satellites in low-Earth orbit.

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But we've seen that sort of activity from the US, from China and from India.

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So there's at least four nations that have kinetic anti-satellite weapons, and there are a bunch of other,

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perhaps quite not quite as catastrophic threats out there, you know,

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signals jamming the use of lasers to dazzle sensors, etc. All of these things now exist.

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And so the two analogies for the first two bullets exist for space.

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And my argument is that satellites now need to start doing the sort of things that have

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been true in the air domain to protect themselves against those increasing threats.

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So I thought I would include a picture here of a satellite employing SSA warfare techniques to try and avoid being seen.

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If you can't see the satellite proves it's working, then doesn't it?

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Um, obviously I slightly cheated here.

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I'd just put a picture of space field up, but this is the sort of scenario that we are actually going to find ourselves faced with.

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Because, as I'll explain in a minute, we're actually not all that great at space situational awareness at the moment.

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And if satellites start trying to hide from us, it's going to get a lot, lot worse.

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So I coined the term phrase space situational awareness warfare, and it's an issue for people like me because I've spent,

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as Rob explained in the introduction, quite a bit of my time over the last few years trying to make space a safer place.

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There is an awful lot of debris up there, some of which has been created by deliberate anti-satellite weapon engagements.

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Quite a lot of which has been just created by random collisions between pieces of debris.

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So space is a congested place already, and satellite designers are already having to think quite hard about which orbits they use.

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So if we get into a situation where satellites are deliberately trying to make the job of tracking much harder,

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we're going to have a lot of sort of ghost objects up there whizzing around.

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But we can't see, and that's going to make it much, much harder to achieve what I refer to as space traffic control.

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You may also see the phrase space traffic management coming out of the United States.

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My there are different definitions available for those terms.

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My definitions are the following that space traffic management is what's happening.

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Largely at the moment. It's a series of gentlemen's agreements between various nation states and various

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commercial operators to try and play nice and keep out of each other's way.

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But it's not legally binding, and there are no legal consequences if you don't follow those agreements.

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Space Traffic Control, which was the title of my book,

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is where I think the lawyers get involved and there are actually internationally binding regulations about what you do in space.

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And there are legal consequences if you don't follow them. So I don't know if you come across the phrase navigation warfare.

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I first encountered it in the mid-1990s. There are in US doctrine at least three principles of navigation warfare.

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You want to be able to continue to navigate yourself. You want to do is deny the ability to use precision navigation and timing to the opposition.

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And because there is so much dependence upon those signals and services from satellites.

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The other aim of navigation warfare is to try and avoid causing considerable disruption to things like financial markets and

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to aircraft navigation and to ship navigation by modifying the navigation services outside a particular theatre of operation.

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So the idea is to try and limit whatever you do in the navigation warfare sphere through the particular area of a conflict.

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Not obviously easy to do, but you can see that the sort of general idea of, say,

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switching off certain signals that you think the enemy might be exploiting.

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If you were to switch them off in a permanent fashion would potentially influence a

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lot of people outside the theatre of operations as the satellites orbit the Earth.

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So that's not an acceptable solution. And I've adopted similar principles for space situational awareness warfare.

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You want to maintain a good knowledge of what's going on in the space environment yourself.

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You potentially want to degrade your adversaries understanding of what's going on up there,

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especially when you're trying to do things and because there are all these dependencies.

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He's on space systems. You want to try and do things that aren't going to affect all the other uses of space in the civil and commercial domains.

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So how do we find out what is going on up there at the moment?

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Well, we have let a large off facilities that are generally used to track objects that are in what I'm going to refer to as low-Earth orbit.

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So if you haven't come across the definition before, low-Earth orbit is typically from about 500 kilometres,

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which is roughly the altitude at which the atmosphere is thin enough to maintain a permanently stable orbit up to a little over a thousand kilometres.

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There's then a region where the Van Allen radiation belts dominate, where you don't find too many satellites.

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There is then medium Earth orbit, which is about three Earth radii away.

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That's where you'll find most of the navigation satellites and then geostationary orbit,

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probably abbreviated in here as Jio is about six Earth radii away from the planet.

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And that's where you'll find a lot of the communications and some of the other military satellites.

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So the low-Earth orbit stuff tracked by radars because the ranges are not enormous and you get a decent rate of return for higher orbit stuff,

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the medium Earth orbit satellites and the geostationary satellites.

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Typically, the tracking is done optically quite a lot with passive optical telescopes.

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A few infra-red ones. Not so many of those.

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And just occasionally laser ranging facilities like this is the one that Hersman so down in Sussex, where you actually transmit a laser beam,

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a measure the time of flight of your laser pulse in order to measure a range to a satellite and generate an orbit for it.

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Those two techniques are the ones that generally contribute to the large catalogue that the US maintains of all the stuff in Earth orbit.

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And depending on when you ask the question and who exactly you ask,

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you'll get a figure somewhere in the top thousand objects in that catalogue at the moment.

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There is also passive RF satellites sometimes deliberately transmit beacons to enable them to be tracked,

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but they transmit state of health information, call telemetry, and they also transmit the data that they collect.

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If they're a surveillance satellite, for example, they'll transmit the images down as radio signals.

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So satellites that are active have an RF signature as well, which can be exploited.

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Typically, that ends up a higher level of classification.

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And so the data collected by these sorts of sensors most of the time until very recently has stayed within the intelligence communities.

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There are now some commercial companies that are starting to track satellites using

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their RF signatures and actually start to contribute to the the overall catalogue.

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And if you're looking for a change in the character of war,

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one of the changes that you might see is some of the functions that have historically been done by large governmental facilities.

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This is the US sponsored radar filing dailies on the north fuel most.

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This is the sort of capability that used to be governmental, but is increasingly now being done in the commercial sector.

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So we're seeing a sort of transition in that sense.

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I don't. You'll be ready to and I don't plan to talk about this slide in detail.

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But what I thought I ought to do is just emphasise the fact that I mentioned just now.

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We're not all that great tracking this stuff that's up there at the moment in particular,

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our ability to track stuff at the moment is typically about 10 centimetre sized objects.

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And unfortunately, that's not good enough.

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You might think 10 centimetres is quite small, but even something the size of a sugar cube travelling at seven and a half kilometres a second,

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which is the velocity that you're doing in low-Earth orbit, carries the equivalent energy of a hand grenade.

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And if you can sort of mentally picture putting a hand grenade behind beside a satellite and detonating it,

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you can say it wouldn't be a good day for the satellite. So unfortunately, we need to improve in terms of the tracking size that we can get down to.

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At the moment, we're alone on models, and the models at the moment are extremely uncertain.

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If you ask Nasser how many objects one centimetre and bigger in Earth orbit, they will tell you the answer is about 500000, according to their model.

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If you ask the European Space Agency the same question, the answer they'll give you is 900000, so nearly a factor of two larger.

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It demonstrates how much different. There is between the different models, and at the moment, we don't know which of those models is more accurate,

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even when we get to the point of being able to track the small stuff.

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Our current catalogues are not well designed for handling literally hundreds of thousands of objects.

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Whichever models, right, we're going to end up with a very big catalogue.

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And the problem that we then have is trying to predict conjunctions between those objects and trying to prevent collisions.

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And when you're trying to do the statistics, the statistics depend on the number of objects in orbit squared.

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So you can see that as the number goes up, the problem becomes computationally very intensive.

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And the final point, which I'll return to a bit later, is that we don't have a very synoptic system.

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The sensors that we rely on are largely ones that were put there in the time of Cold War.

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They were designed to look at Russian ballistic missiles coming over the poles as their primary function, so things like falling down.

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It's not a space tracking radar, it is a ballistic missile warning radar.

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The idea is that it will tell us if the Russians fire something in our direction that its main

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task and its ability to sort of be used as a space surveillance sensor is only incidental.

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And I'll explain how that works a little later.

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But you know, there are, as you can see, a number of other things that mean we're not very good at space situational awareness at the moment.

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And as I say, I think it's going to get worse. So how do you actually implement space situational awareness warfare?

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Well, there's various things that you might do to try and modify the satellite signatures,

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so make it harder for the light radars and telescopes to actually see you.

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You may modify the way that you operate the satellite so that you take your adversary by surprise.

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Your satellite is perhaps not where they expected or not demonstrating the future that they expected.

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And then in theory, and this is based on the sort of things that happen in the air domain,

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you could potentially try to do active things to actually counter the adversary space surveillance sensors.

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So you might think that sounds a little on the extreme side.

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But if you think about the air domain, if you were to come up with a design for a modern fast jet, for example for the military,

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and you didn't have radar warning receivers and some sort of countermeasure that depended on detecting a hostile radar,

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illuminating and potentially firing a missile back to take out the radar.

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You would be laughed at because they are standard fits on military aircraft these days,

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and conceivably satellites may start to rely on such technologies in the future.

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So let's talk a little bit about the signature modification.

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So this is allegedly administration of a thing called Misti, which the US launched some years ago.

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In theory, what it's supposed to be doing is acting as a as a sort of shield for the rest of the satellite here.

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This bit points down towards the Earth and in theory, makes it very hard for radar to track.

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So. Well, yeah, OK, you may be able to do that.

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You'll have to get the design of this shield RF shield correct,

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because potentially the satellite has to do something useful to be worth putting in orbit.

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It then has to transmit the data that it's collecting down to the Earth.

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So at least somewhere in the RF spectrum, there must be a window for the satellite to actually talk to the Earth.

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Potentially, it's got to have sensors in there that can see that through that shield.

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For example, if it was trying to take pictures, for example, optical wavelengths, potentially something might have to get through.

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So it's quite hard to work out how shields like this would actually work out very well in practise.

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You might think, Well, you know, space is black. Why don't we just paint the satellite's black?

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The answer to that is sort of central subject for satellites designers, which is that thermal control is really important to a satellite.

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You put a satellite in Earth orbit, it's in the full glare of the Sun with no intervening atmosphere.

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So the external surfaces of a satellite when it's in the sunshine will get to over 100 degrees Celsius.

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When it goes into the Earth's shadow in low-Earth orbit, it'll start to cool down.

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It may have cooled down to perhaps minus 20 before it, just before it comes out of the Earth's shadow.

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So a large temperature change in a relatively short period of time,

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a satellite in low-Earth orbit takes perhaps 90 or 100 minutes, so just over an hour and a half to go around the planet.

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So in about half that orbit time, maybe 30 to 40 minutes, you're seeing over 100 degrees of temperature change.

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But importantly, at the end of that time, at minus 20 degrees Celsius, for example, you are still a long,

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long way above the thermal background of space, which is at three Kelvin and you are at 350 or so.

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I can remember having a conversation with a guy who designed what infra-red sensors for for air weapons.

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And he said, I really wish I had your problems do it, he said.

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You know, my signal to noise is, you know,

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trying to detect the subtle differences between an aircraft temperature and the background temperature of the sky.

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And there are only a few degrees difference sometimes, whereas you know you've got hundreds of degrees of temperature difference.

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So we could try painting it black,

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but the satellites will overheat and we need to maintain that thermal signature because we need to

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keep the satellites typically at around room temperature for the electronics to work properly.

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So there's quite a lot of insulation that has to go on between the external surfaces and the interior electronics so that you don't

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cycle them through that 100 plus degrees every 90 minutes and and thermal control and being dark in the infra-red is really tricky.

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And as I mentioned just now, it's really difficult sometimes to imagine how you would actually operate the

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satellite if it had some sort of sort of stealth technology stuck on the front.

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Like this because the stealth technology has to be between the satellite and the ground.

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And that's. Generally, the satellite is looking to do something down to the ground, I mean,

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there are satellites that have satellite links and talk to other satellites, but in general, the target of interest is on the ground.

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So you've got to be trying to put your stealth in between you and the stuff you're actually trying to observe and it gets in the way.

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So perhaps you could try and modify your RF signature to make the targets harder to see.

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So there are a variety of ways that you might try and do that as you go up in frequency.

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Typically, the beam width of communication signals comes down.

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So we've seen an evolution up in frequency,

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where now typically tens of gigahertz for the communications frequencies we use and the beam widths are much more narrow.

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And what we've seen as a result is that satellites, especially in geostationary orbit but also elsewhere,

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are starting to get uncomfortably close to other satellites.

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The US, China and Russia all have surveillance assets in geostationary orbit that are getting uncomfortably close to other people's satellites.

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And the principal reason is to get close enough that they're actually in the beams of these relatively narrow, high frequency signals.

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You can do other clever things with your RF signals. You can basically apply a spreading code and actually spread your information across the

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entire bandwidth of the satellite can transmit and potentially sit below the noise floor.

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And if the receiver knows the code that they've you've used, you can invert that process and recover the signal.

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Potentially, that makes you harder to see and the RF sense.

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Rather than just going up and down from the satellite,

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you might have signals that come up to the satellite and then get relayed across to another satellite mention of Arthur C. Clarke just now.

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This is from the original paper that he wrote sort of popularising the idea of geostationary satellites in 1945.

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And, you know, he clearly was thinking a long way ahead. He's not just thinking about the signals going up and down to the satellites.

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He's got this large, equilateral triangle where the satellites are talking to each other,

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and you can do that to try and make your signals harder for your adversary to spot.

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And you could get out of the RF domain altogether and start using laser into satellite links, and that's also starting to happen.

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So this is the European data relay satellite here,

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and there are various subscriber satellites in low-Earth orbit that transmit information up on laser links.

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And obviously, a laser beam is very limited, so it's very difficult for an adversary to actually intercept and exploit your communications.

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If you're using lasers, satellites are actually getting harder to see almost organically.

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And that's because the improvements in electronics technology and optics has led to satellites sizes decreasing.

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So typically, high resolution surveillance you want is involved.

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Multi metre class spacecraft that were very intelligent and it's very easy to spot satellites are getting smaller and smaller.

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Some of the ones on the left hand side there are admittedly not delivering quite the same quality of imagery, but there are an awful lot of them.

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So they are proliferating and that's another way of achieving resilience.

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But they are certainly getting much smaller, so the satellites are getting closer to the limit that we can reliably detect.

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So these sort of so-called CubeSats,

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a weight of five kilograms corresponds to typically 10 centimetres by 10 centimetres by maybe 30 centimetres would be a 3U cubesat.

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So something about the size of a shoe box, and it's generating sort of militarily relevant data, a three to five metre spatial resolution.

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And you know, the company that are launching these things, called Planet, have launched over 150 of them now.

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So one of the things that you might choose to do is the sort of technologies that have been employed in the air domain historically.

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I mentioned M earlier. So basically, when you think your satellite might be in view of an enemy listening post,

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you might choose to turn off its transmissions and just transmit data down when you

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think you're in a more safe location space and you might modify your frequencies.

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War modes are a standard thing in military communications.

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Already, various different systems have the ability in a time of crisis to switch to a new frequency.

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Potentially, we could do that with satellites. There is a sort of limitation here in the sense that there are international agreements managed by the.

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The International Telecommunications Union that tried to stop interference between satellites.

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So the idea is that before you launch your satellite,

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you register the frequencies that it will transmit and you basically tell the world what you're going to be doing.

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And if nobody objects, then you're able to launch your satellite and use those frequencies, hopefully without interference to anybody else.

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If you would deliberately to bypass that system to create war modes where you had frequencies on the satellite,

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if you hadn't told anybody about it, very you can do that technically in practise.

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What that might result in is some level of interference if you haven't coordinated your frequencies in advance.

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You could try using novel orbit. What are the challenges that we have, as I mentioned earlier, is that all the major radars?

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Well, up in the northern hemisphere to see the Russian ballistic missiles,

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all these other tracking sites down closer to the equator are largely telescopes that are used to track the high orbit satellites.

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So there have been occasions, including a launch that came out of Japan back in 1995, which was never tracked.

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It went round the Earth two and a half times. It was a bit of a launch failure.

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The rocket underperformed, but the people have gone.

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I got a rather a surprise when the satellite re-entered over their country.

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But this particular thing was never in the catalogue. It was never tracked.

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It was never added to the US database because they never saw it, because it was in too low an orbit and too low and an inclination to the equator.

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You can deliberately manoeuvre the satellite, and this is a slight exaggeration.

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Hopefully, you don't apply sufficient force to bend your solar panels,

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but obviously using propellant is something that you would only do in extremists because propellant is a life limiting factor for a satellite.

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You've only got a certain size fuel tank, so you could do this, but you're shown the lifetime of your satellite.

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If you keep making random manoeuvres, you could get some orbit modification kind of for free if you operate in a very low earth orbit.

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So the space station is at about this altitude. There are very few things below it,

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and the reason being that there's quite a lot of drag at those altitudes and potentially

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you will have to keep boosting your satellite orbit in order to overcome the drag.

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But the drag is temporarily variant because the activity of the sun affects the drag.

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So basically it's like space weather. So if you work in a very low orbit, you're continually needing to adjust your own orbit,

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but that will make it more difficult for an adversary to know exactly where you're going to be in space.

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You can use the stuff that's up there. You could just sort of stay adjacent to your the rocket body that's placed you in orbit.

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And I think the US refer to this as snuggling. I think that sounds a lot cosier than it actually is.

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But, you know, even if you decided to avoid the debris problem and get rid of your own rocket body,

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there are plenty of other large rocky bodies left up there by the Russians and others

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back in the day and even other satellites that you could get up close and personal to.

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And that changes the calculus for an aggressor, because now if they want to attack your satellite,

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potentially they could end up engaging the other object that you're adjacent to.

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This actually kind of happened to the U.K. The satellite in the centre here is the UK's Skynet 5a satellite.

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It was moved to a location on the geostationary arc at 9:05 East, which you can imagine is sort of within view of China.

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China decided to send its surveillance satellite Qingchuan, 17, to have a look at us and got uncomfortably close to our satellite.

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Interestingly, however, the US were shadowing Xinjiang 17 with their own geostationary space situational awareness programme G-SAP.

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So we actually ended up with two near neighbours rather than just one. This is the reality of stuff in geostationary orbit at the moment.

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It's getting congested and it's uncoordinated because the people operating those three satellites are not talking to one another,

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so they're not communicating or with changes they're making, and the possibility for a collision is increasing.

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You'll probably have come across the US research entity DARPA. They're actually looking to take this sort of concept even to the constellation level.

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So the satellites in white are members of the OneWeb constellation.

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And DARPA's idea was to buy a whole load of satellites that looked extremely like OneWeb satellites.

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They're the ones in green and actually use them for military purposes and kind of hype.

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The military element in this constellation amongst the civil elements.

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Whether that would actually work with a sophisticated adversary, I'm not sure because I think you might notice a difference in the transmissions you

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could in extremists do the sorts of things that aircraft do and deploy active decoys.

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It's an expensive way to go. It's also quite difficult to maintain a decoy that you've deployed because especially in low-Earth orbit,

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the drag on the satellites would be different because they would have a different area to mass ratio and they would tend to drift.

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So it might be a temporary solution to a problem, but it might actually confuse your adversary for a little while, and that might be all you need.

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You could play dead. It works for certain lizards and other creatures.

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A satellite that appears to be tumbling and is not transmitting signals might be assumed to fail.

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And then it might take your adversary by surprise if it's suddenly stabilised and started performing a mission again.

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It's obviously going to cost you in playing dead.

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You're probably not performing a useful mission while you're playing dead because the satellite's not pointing in the right direction.

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But maybe a temporary outage is better than a permanent one.

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You could try and overwhelm the tracking system, so this is where I need to explain how the the ballistic missile defence radars work.

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They obviously have enough range to see all of the satellites in low-Earth orbit,

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the apogee of a ballistic missile trajectories typically on the order of 4000 kilometres,

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which is above where most of the low-Earth orbit satellites are.

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So basically, if they just put up a radar fence, they will see a lot of satellites flying through it.

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And clearly they don't want to be issuing warnings about known objects in space.

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They want to be issuing warnings about new ballistic missiles.

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So they have to have a catalogue and know where to expect to see things they can say, right?

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Yes. OK, something's just flown through our fence. We know about that.

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It's this particular object we were expecting at that particular time.

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Move on. Okay. So the things that get them excited is what they call uncorrelated targets where

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something comes through their radar fence and it's not in their catalogue.

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At that point, they start to think about issuing warnings like try and calculate an orbit most of the time.

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Fortunately, these things are in Earth orbit and are not are not ballistic missiles headed that way.

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But they have to expend extra radar resource to achieve that.

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Now, if the satellite manoeuvres, obviously, it doesn't appear coming through their radar fence at the expected time,

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it therefore becomes an uncorrelated target. If an adversary was to manoeuvre all of their satellites, then potentially in a given day,

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you would have a lot of satellites coming through at unexpected times, and it takes a while to untangle,

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you know, sort of the and reacquire and gain confidence that you have got custody of the right objects that you've actually,

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you know, sort of assigned a new orbit to this thing that's manoeuvred. That's not a trivial process.

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We discovered quite how bad it was back in 1989,

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when the Sun created a major event that pumped up the Earth's atmosphere quite significantly, almost overnight.

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That increased the drag on lots of satellites by quite a significant amount,

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which meant that lots and lots of the objects that were in the catalogue appeared at the wrong time,

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with the result that nearly a large proportion of the catalogue became uncorrelated targets simultaneously.

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And, you know, allegedly it took them nearly a year to untangle the mess.

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So simultaneous manoeuvre potentially helps. Another issue that we found with the launches that are taking place at the moment,

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where they're putting up sometimes over 100 satellites on a single rocket.

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They're all very small satellites, but India launched over 100, I think, last year on a single rocket.

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It's really, really hard when all of those sub payloads get deployed to work out, which is which.

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So if an adversary due to surge launch and put a whole load of extra stuff into orbit, you're back into this.

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Loads of uncorrelated targets from the timing of these sorts of events could have an effect.

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So if you did actually choose to do lots of manoeuvres or lots of launches, a time of high solar activity,

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you can almost guarantee that people will get very confused because they'd have a lot of natural uncorrelated targets,

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as well as all the new stuff that you've chosen to give them as a problem.

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The cyber threat potentially applies here because we have this catalogue that I was talking about, it gets pulsed around the world.

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In theory, if somebody could get access to that database, they could erase or move things in it, which would potentially complicate matters.

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So the integrity of that database is an important thing to preserve.

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There is the possibility perception techniques. You know, if you've read any of this sort of history of the Second World War,

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it's quite astonishing how much effort was put into deception techniques.

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You could do that in the space domain. The US had just invested in a large new radar facility on an island called Koechlin in the Pacific.

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It allegedly will get down to these once two centimetre sized objects.

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I was talking about the moment, frankly, very few other people are able to contradict the US if they say we can see a bunch of objects.

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So imagine you're the operator of a satellite that the US might consider hostile,

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and you're suddenly told by US Space Command that there's a cloud of debris objects heading towards your satellite.

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Do you believe the Americans are? Move your satellite out of the way, potentially taking it offline for a while?

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Or do you write it out in?

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Say the Americans are lying to me and they just telling me there's this ghost debris that's not really coming to a satellite,

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so that's one way you could do some quite creative accounting.

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Another thing that is interesting is that the US don't publish the orbital elements for their own satellites.

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They think that that creates a degree of protection. I would refer you to this website called Heavens Above,

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which is where all the amateurs with their binoculars go and they find it a particular challenge just because the US don't announce their orbits.

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All the amateurs concentrate on the US satellites and put the orbital elements of the satellites on this website.

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The US treats the orbits of their satellites as not only Top-Secret, but also no foreign nationals,

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you know, so they don't actually advertise their orbits to, you know, even friendly nations like the UK.

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But you can find their orbits on on a website not entirely logical.

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But anyway, if the US were to choose to take a slightly different approach,

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they could add one of their real satellites to what they might claim in the catalogue.

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With the debris object might not be a debris object, might be a real satellite.

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You could get into the sort of game that happens in the air domain where you see a radar signal coming up and you

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take measures to actually either transmit at the radar frequency to confuse the sensor that's trying to track you.

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There are some really subtle techniques now where if you process the incoming radar signal sufficiently fast,

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you can transmit back a return that either appears to move your satellite or actually transmit

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kind of counselling waves that will actually sort of disclose your signal altogether.

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So these are techniques that are happening in the air domain.

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We just haven't played them satellites yet, and I promised Rob over lunch that I would talk about this, which is artificial ionospheric modification.

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So there are at least a couple of facilities around the world.

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There's one in Alaska. I think that belongs to the US, obviously, and one in Russia,

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where they're transmitting relatively low frequency radio waves into the atmosphere and actually coupling

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that energy into the ionosphere and affecting the propagation characteristics of the ionosphere.

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If you will then trying to do surveillance of satellites through the ionosphere,

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conceivably your radars will get really dodgy results and you will get very inaccurate

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orbits if the ionosphere is not behaving in the way that you expect it to.

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A lot of satellites in low-Earth orbit are now exploiting GPS signals in the way that our mobile phones do to help us navigate.

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Satellites do that, too. The problem is that there are certain regions in the world.

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This one's in in Syria, where there are very large sort of transmission sites that are putting up an awful lot of GPS

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interference with the idea of compromising the operation of military precision guided munitions,

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amongst other things.

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Unfortunately, these transmitters are so strong that they are actually interfering with the receivers on the low-Earth orbit satellites.

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If you think about it, a low Earth orbit satellite, maybe only 500 kilometres away from that jammer,

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whereas the navigation satellite that it's trying to listen to several thousand kilometres away.

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So basically, the ground based signal overbite overwhelms the space based one.

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Now that's generally a problem, but it's a very specific problem.

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If you happen to be, say, the Starlink constellation that Elon Musk is launching,

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where those satellites are dependent on the GPS receivers to know where they are in

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space so that they can take evasion manoeuvres when they get a conjunction warning,

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i.e. when the Starlink constellation is told that there's something potentially on a collision course with them.

389
00:42:38,240 --> 00:42:42,500
They've got an automated system that will manoeuvre the satellites out of the way,

390
00:42:42,500 --> 00:42:46,700
which sounds great, but it only works if the satellite knows where it is.

391
00:42:46,700 --> 00:42:51,890
As soon as the satellite doesn't know where it is, you're imperilling the space environment.

392
00:42:51,890 --> 00:42:59,300
So a page of conclusions to finish. I hope I've convinced you that, you know, we're not all that great at SSA already,

393
00:42:59,300 --> 00:43:06,860
but it's going to almost certainly get harder as people start to do some of the techniques that I've talked about against us.

394
00:43:06,860 --> 00:43:13,610
I think it's pretty much inevitable. We're starting to see some of those effects already.

395
00:43:13,610 --> 00:43:19,630
And my ultimate conclusion is we need to get a lot better at space situational.

396
00:43:19,630 --> 00:43:25,170
We need to invest in more sensors with more capabilities in more places around the globe.

397
00:43:25,170 --> 00:43:33,660
You know, having, you know, almost an entire half orbit in the southern hemisphere where we're not tracking stuff at all is really not helping much.

398
00:43:33,660 --> 00:43:37,020
So we need to get a lot better at that point. I'll stop.

399
00:43:37,020 --> 00:43:41,430
I don't know how long you can stay at and how long we have questions, but I'm very happy to take him.

400
00:43:41,430 --> 00:43:47,880
Thanks very much.