(DURIP) PRECISION ALIGNMENT OF A STELLAR INTERFEROMETER IN SUPPORT OF SSA EFFORTS
Abstract
The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMT) is engaged in the research and development of an amplitude interferometer telescope array for Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) Space Situational Awareness (SSA) with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) under a cooperative agreement initiated in 2015. The project is being managed for AFOSR through AFRL and the manager in charge of our project there is Lieutenant David Buehler. The MRO Interferometer (MROI) development site is located in a remote, high-altitude location in the Magdalena Mountains near Socorro, New Mexico, south of the Kirtland Air Force Base and west of White Sands Missile Range. The MROI interferometric telescope array is scalable on fairly short timescales (hours) to allow access to angular sizes that range from more than 40 milliarcseconds down to 0.3milliarcseconds with sensitivities 100x fainter than existing facilities today. This will allow us tocreate images at spatial scales from 10’s of meters to less than 0.5 meter at 36,000 km at GEO.This scaling approach is accomplished by physically moving the 30-ton telescope plus enclosure between 28 kinematic pads distributed across an area the size of several football fields. The importance of this strategic capability will be unique in the DoD portfolio for SSA applications, as well as for a host of astrophysics problems, where rapid redeployment of the telescopes between different positions can allow researchers to optimally scale the array size to the object they are looking at – much like a zoom lens on a camera.SSA is a critical topic today for the electronic battlefield that is part of the current DoD remote sensing portfolio and of particular interest to AFRL. Being able to assess the health of our own GEO assets is a basic first step to maintaining current hardware and safely deploying new hardware.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 07, 2023
- Source ID
- FA95502110252
Entities
People
- Michelle Creech-eakman
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
- United States Air Force