By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON—The Air Force on Tuesday took control of a super-powerful space telescope developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but operational use won’t begin until around 2020, after the system is moved to Australia, a DARPA official said.
The Space Surveillance Telescope, or SST, will be operated by Air Force Space Command in cooperation with the Royal Australian Air Force to track debris floating around space about 36,000 kilometers from Earth, said Lindsay Millard, DARPA’s program manager.
“SST has about an order of magnitude better performance than the existing space surveillance network,” the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS), she told reporters in an Oct. 18 conference call.
Three technologies help contribute to that performance. The telescope incorporates the steepest curved primary telescope mirror — produced by L3 — ever made, which can collect light across a wider field of view. The first-ever “curved charge coupled device” for the camera provides clear imagery, and its fast shutter speed allows it to take a greater number of photos.
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