Space Flight Now
CAPE CANAVERAL — Culminating years of construction and testing, a $1.2 billion satellite designed to spot and track enemy missiles threatening the United States homeland, its deployed military forces abroad or allied nations will ascend to a surveillance post in space Thursday.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket will boost the third Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous Earth Orbit satellite, or SBIRS GEO Flight 3, to orbit from Cape Canaveral during a 40-minute window opening at 7:46 p.m. EST (0046 GMT).
Kicking off another year, ULA plans at least 11 national security and science-enabling launches from the Cape and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California during 2017.
And it all begins by launching a satellite to support one the U.S. military’s most critical missions — providing early warning of impending missile attacks.
“This is a prime, important national security space launch and will continue the ability to do 24/7 missile warning for the nation and our allies,” said Col. Dennis Bythewood, director of the Remote Sensing Systems Directorate at the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center.
SBIRS evolves the orbital monitoring system from the Cold War focus on intercontinental ballistic missiles to today’s short-range missile threats by incorporating new technologies to make quicker detections of fainter objects.
SBIRS data tightens the U.S. military’s OODA loop — Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. It allows leaders to make decisions and take actions faster.
“The capability of the satellites we are launching now basically cuts in half the amount of time it takes for the satellite find and fix a missile launch on the face of the Earth and feed that into our missile warning network,” Bythewood said.
“What SBIRS brings in capability beyond the Defense Support Program is the ability to find dimmer targets with shorter burn times, and those are representative of the tactical missile threats that we see in Asia and the Middle East today. That (data) provides both where they were launched from and predictions of where they will impact, which allows our troops in harm’s way to take the appropriate action to spare life and limb.”
Approximately 8,000 infrared events are detected and addressed each year, including roughly 200 missile launches, according to the Air Force’s SBIRS ground controllers.
And according to U.S. government intelligence, proliferation of ballistic missile systems, using advanced liquid- or solid-propellant propulsion technologies, are becoming more mobile, survivable, reliable, accurate and capable of striking targets over longer distances, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency says.
“Over the last five years, the Missile Defense Agency has seen an increase of about 1,200 additional ballistic missiles, with 5,900 outside NATO, Russia and China, and hundreds of launchers and missiles are currently in range of our deployed forces,” Bythewood said.
“Those trends we expect to continue, and the stress that puts on our mission area to provide timely and accurate missile warning data will grow as we move forward.
“We address that in two ways: The inherent capability of the SBIRS sensors to detect those dimmer and shorter burning targets and the ongoing work within our technical intelligence side to understand what missiles are out there and what we need to do to detect them. That’s work for software algorithms that allows us to pull data out of the infrared information that SBIRS deleivers and deliver that as actual missile warning, which means I know where the missile came from and I know where it’s going. That’s a continuous effort that we do every day.”
Weighing about 10,000 pounds at launch, the GEO Flight 3 satellite will be injected by the Atlas 5 into a standard geosynchronous transfer orbit with a high point of 22,237 statute miles, low point of 115 miles and inclination of 23.29 degrees to the equator. Separation of the spacecraft from the rocket occurs about 43 minutes after liftoff…
