In-orbit imaging a “game-changer” in space situational awareness

Australia-based start-up HEO has been turning satellite Earth-observation cameras towards space to make hiding in orbit harder for adversary actors.

The company, founded in 2019 as a spin-out from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, raised US$8 million earlier this year to expand its services and launch new sensors to observe objects in space. The firm is currently buying time on existing Earth-observation satellites to image other spacecraft in orbit.

“We are using sensors on-board satellite platforms in orbit around the Earth, taking resolved images – not just dots in the background – so that we can actually see and resolve features of resident space objects,” Toby Harris, director of space applications at HEO said in a lecture at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London in April this year.

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Defence and space industry analysts have hailed the technology as a “game-changer” in space situational awareness, especially as it arrives at a time of increased global investment into military space capabilities and heightened geopolitical tension.

“It’s definitely a game-changer,” Juliana Suess, a research fellow for space security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK-based defence thinktank, told Shephard.

“Traditional space situational awareness is based on radar and telescope data, and information that states and companies give us when they send the satellite up. But previously, we didn’t have that sort of verification method to begin to understand what sort of capabilities that satellite might have.”

During the lecture, Harris explained that HEO takes advantage of the so-called conjunctions – moments when two objects orbiting the Earth pass each other at a close distance – to take images of the target satellite by any of the available spacecraft operated by HEOs partnering companies. The firm currently cooperates with Earth-observation data providers Satellogic and Axelspace, and can tap into a pool of 35 satellites to promptly complete a task.

“It normally takes 24-to-72 hours to get close enough,” said Harris. “We then slew that satellite around, take the image, put the satellite back and send the image to the ground.”

Will Crowe, co-founder and CEO of HEO, told Shephard that it takes on average about 50 days for government-run space surveillance networks to identify non-US satellites after launch.

“At any given time, there are more than 500 unidentified objects on public catalogues,” Crowe said. “We’re helping to reduce that number.”

The firm supplies imagery to intelligence agencies across the Five Eyes alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. Commercial companies can also request images but only of their own spacecraft, Crowe added.

Restricting to whom such services can be sold is key to making sure that critical intelligence does not find its way into adversary hands, Suess remarked. In March this year, The Atlantic reported that Russia’s long-range strikes on Ukraine by cruise missiles may have been directed using satellite imagery purchased from US companies by commercial entities acting on behalf of Russia.

“Supply chain security is more important than ever,” Suess said. “Especially now when we see the ‘New Space’ market angling more towards defence customers.”

HEO’s current partners operate satellites in orbits at altitudes between 450 and 500 kilometres, which gives the company a good overview of assets in low-Earth orbit (LEO) – the first 1,000km above the planet’s surface where most Earth-observation satellites, as well as the International Space Station and China’s Tiangong space station, reside.

“Most of the coverage that we have and most of the imagery that we can take happens in that kind of region in terms of the best possible resolution,” Harris said during the lecture. “Once you want to look at altitudes of 700km or 800km, you are quite a long way away from these satellites. But we will try and expand to high LEO above 800km altitude and ultimately to geostationary orbit (GEO) at 36,000km.”

The company is currently testing two prototypes of their home-built non-Earth imaging cameras as hosted payloads on the Turion DROID cubesat, launched in June 2023, and on a Space Machines satellite, in space since March this year.

“We are looking for an opportunity to put our payloads on some of these higher-orbiting spacecraft,” Harris said. “The same goes for very low-Earth orbit below 300km, where there are not many satellites with cameras. And, in GEO. There is currently no commercial satellite with cameras in GEO at all. We would like to be able to begin that novel application of imagery in that altitude as well.”

Satellites at the geostationary ring 36,000km above the Earth’s surface appear suspended above a fixed spot above the equator. As they enjoy a stable view of a large region of the planet, satellites at these altitudes have traditionally been used for TV broadcasting and weather monitoring. But the US Space Force has been sounding alarms in recent years about the growing number of Chinese satellites launched into this orbit with supposed espionage purposes, allegations that China denies.

“[Our technology] will allow us to identify every object in space and understand what it is doing,” said Crowe.

Suess added that the technology “came at the right time to be able to do these kinds of verifications” amid threats of a possible deployment of nuclear weapons in space and the militarisation of the space domain.