New ocean surveillance satellites

From Aviation Week

Secret Surveillance Satellites To Launch In June

Craig Covault/Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

A secret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) dual-satellite ocean surveillance mission to track potential terrorist movements at sea and monitor Chinese and Iranian ship tactics is being readied for liftoff June 14 from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas V, intelligence sources tell Aviation Week.

The National Ocean Surveillance System (NOSS) flight is designated NRO L-30. The importance of NRO's space ocean surveillance role in connection with the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard has been elevated since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The need to track thousands of civilian ships worldwide has intensified given the potential for seemingly harmless shipping to be involved in nuclear, chemical or biological terrorist operations. And nations like China and Iran also are demonstrating new sea-based tactics and capabilities that must be monitored.

The two satellites on the Atlas V mission have a combined mass of about 6.5 tons and primarily will use electronic intelligence (elint) techniques combined with interferometry. The spacecraft and launcher combined have a total cost of roughly $600 million - $800 million.

The satellites will fly in a formation that is precisely controlled to obtain data at different times when they overfly ships as they move or remain stationary between the satellites' passes

Those data then will be combined with information from about 18 other NRO ocean surveillance satellites spaced in 6-7 separate formations orbiting the globe.

At the same time the NRO is readying the ocean surveillance mission, the agency also is initiating a major new procurement for a new stopgap optical imaging system.

The new system is aimed at allowing the intelligence community to recover from delays in the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) program, which has yet to launch an operational spacecraft.

The delays have occurred because of poor performance by Boeing in the optical program that has now been given to Lockheed Martin. Boeing has retained the imaging radar half of the program.

The new spacecraft are especially needed to obtain imaging intelligence of China, Iran, and North Korea as older imaging reconnaissance satellites expire. The competitors are likely to be DigitalGlobe and GeoEye.

The twin-satellite ocean surveillance mission is part of a major military space push to launch eight additional DOD payloads through year's end. Five of them will be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. Many of the missions involve research and development on new technologies important for growing U.S. military space operations such as ballistic missile defense and space surveillance.

The Atlas V ocean surveillance mission will be NRO's first launch since the agency was stunned by the failure of a $300 million class research and development spacecraft affiliated with the FIA program shortly after its Dec. 14 Delta II launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.