Professor Moriba Jah, Lead of the Strauss Center’s Space Security and Safety Program and Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, recently launched a Space Situational Awareness Project with IBM. This project will use IBM’s technologies to build upon ASTRIAGraph, the existing open source resource built by Dr. Jah and his team at UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center. The aim of this project is to “track, analyze and update the locations of thousands of objects in orbit.” Jah and his colleague at IBM, Naeem Altaf, hope that this endeavor will help to bring “order, open-sources data and better regulation of space traffic.” Read more about the project here.
The University of Texas at Austin has received a $9.3 million seed grant from the Texas Space Commission to establish the Space Domain Awareness (SDA) Tools, Applications, and Processing (TAP) Lab, becoming the first academic institution to work directly with the United States Space Force to detect, analyze, and counter space-based threats in near real time. Space Security, Safety, & Sustainability...
At the Strauss Center’s “Operational Assurance for All” 12th Annual Space Traffic Conference, Aarti Holla-Maini, head of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, highlighted growing difficulties in contacting satellite operators to coordinate maneuvers and prevent collisions as orbital traffic increases. The conference was recently highlighted in SpaceNews. Holla-Maini revealed that her office intervened twice in the past year...
Space Security, Safety, & Sustainability Program Lead Moriba Jah was recently interviewed for an article published in NDTV on the growing problem of space debris in the context of the Chinese Shenzhou-20 Incident. On November 25, China’s Shenzhou-20 noticed damage and cracking to the spacecraft’s window due to excess space debris in orbit. “Until countries and companies consider data accuracy...