[Peetwo]

Extract:

"Sbirs data has also been used by U.S. intelligence officials as they continue to unravel the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370), another 777-200ER, that disappeared in March 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. According to information from Malay military radar, the aircraft is thought to have crossed the Malayan peninsula and possibly crashed into the Indian Ocean. A flaperon belonging to the aircraft later washed up on the French overseas territory of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. The aircraft is thought to have flown in an area not highly trafficked, making it easier for Sbirs to find and track the heat signature of a 777-200ER.

Officials at the 460th declined to articulate their role in the search, and U.S. intelligence is unlikely to advertise if and how its data was used, for fear of revealing its capabilities. But Jackson says the team did participate by providing technical data to the intelligence community."

Full article:
http://aviationweek.com/space/unpreceden...sbirs-veil

Related / Relevant:
http://aviationweek.com/Sbirs#slide-0-fi...es-1364911

Excellent catch ventus...

An Unprecedented Peek Behind The Sbirs Veil

Oct 20, 2015 Amy Butler | Aviation Week & Space Technology


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An Exclusive Look At Sbirs And Its Capabilities

• Providing Continuous Missile Warning From Space
  

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In less than 10 sec., every point on the face of the Earth is imaged by the U.S. Air Force’s newest infrared (IR) missile warning satellite system.
The message from the operators of the new Space-Based Infrared System (Sbirs) at the 460th Space Wing at Buckley AFB, Colorado, is that missile or space launches cannot happen anywhere on Earth—or over it—without their knowing. With Sbirs, they can detect a launch faster than ever, more accurately identify the missile type, more precisely calculate its burnout velocity and trajectory (state vector) and more exactly determine an impact point.
The Air Force has not disclosed the system’s precise capabilities. In part, this is due to security concerns. Sbirs, along with its less capable Defense Support Program (DSP) predecessor, is the first cue system for the Pentagon’s entire ballistic missile defense architecture that protects the nation and U.S. forces abroad. It employs the sensors that would first detect a ballistic missile launch from North Korea, Iran, Russia, China or other potential aggressors. Sbirs is also responsible for “tipping” off other assets—such as ground- and ship-based radars—to detect a missile before engaging with an interceptor or warning soldiers to take cover.



Confident that the system’s woes were worth the trouble—it is nearly $14 billion over budget and nine years late—the service is preparing for a new iteration of Sbirs, combining remote ground-based locations into one, multifunctional command, control and analysis center. Officials gave Aviation Week unprecedented access to see the Sbirs center at Buckley Aug. 18 and watch operators train on the system before it goes operational next year.
With two of four of the Sbirs geosynchronous (GEO) satellites in orbit and three complementary IR payloads on classified highly elliptical orbit (HEO) satellites operating, the Air Force is finally starting to see a return on nearly two decades of technical challenges, cost overruns and delays. “This is the pivotal time in overhead persistent infrared history,” says Col. Mike Jackson, operations group commander for the 460th. Finally getting these sensors into orbit and an “explosion” in computing power advances has allowed the service to begin using this data in ways never thought possible when  the missile-warning workhorse DSP was first launched in 1970. At that time, DSP’s sole purpose was to warn of a missile launch—primarily from what was then the Soviet Union.
Now, however, at least 24 countries operate and sell a variety of ballistic missile designs, making the job of missile warning more complex and, to many, more urgent. Ballistic missiles are more capable, accurate and mobile, Jackson says. “They are sold like chickens at the market in some places,” he says. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) chief Vice Adm. James Syring says nations such as China and Russia are also developing more advanced countermeasures designed to fool U.S. sensors into mischaracterizing the missiles or shooting at the wrong target.

Expanding the Mission
The Sbirs development began in 1996 with four key missions to address: providing missile warning (its primary focus), cueing missile defenses, offering technical intelligence about missiles and delivering battlespace awareness of IR events globally. Operators at the 460th are greatly expanding the system’s utility thanks to new computing power never imagined 20 years ago, Jackson says.
Also contributing to the diversity of possible missions is the sheer number of sensors in orbit. Along with Sbirs GEO-1 and -2  and three scanning sensors in HEO orbit , the Pentagon continues to rely on an undisclosed number of legacy DSP satellites. Designed to last five years, DSP-16, the oldest remaining bird, is still operating after 24 years, says Col. John Wagner, commander of the 460th.


Credit: U.S. Air Force Concept


Designed with short- and mid-wave IR detectors, Sbirs can theoretically “see” any IR event—such as a forest fire, bomb explosion or plane crash. The sensors are “tuned” to look for specific events, such as the hot plumes of ICBMs, but are also constantly collecting background data from other heat events, data kept by the Pentagon. In the event of a natural disaster or bombing, for example, operators can find the information collected during that specific time and provide it to authorities.

An example is the case of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), a Boeing 777-200ER that was shot down by a Russian-made BUK missile on July 17, 2014, killing 283 passengers and 15 crew. Mystery still surrounds the incident. The aircraft was downed en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, and U.S. and allied officials suspect pro-Russian separatists near the Ukraine-Russia border launched the missile as tensions mounted in the region. Though the BUK, or SA-11, was initially indicated, it is likely that Sbirs data helped the intelligence community confirm the assessment.

Officials at the 460th did not disclose their specific role in this work. “This is the art of what we do,” Jackson says, noting that Sbirs and satellite IR data is used to shed light on thousands of nonmissile events annually. If operators know the time of an event and Sbirs sensors were imaging the area—and they likely were, as the U.S. closely monitors Russian forces operating near the Ukrainian border—they can filter out information about a specific event. The shootdown of an airliner would produce a hot explosion, and operators could likely go through the Sbirs data to forensically image the plume of the offending missile and, perhaps, an approximate location of its launch point. The data could then be correlated against other sources of intelligence to suggest who commanded that particular missile.

Sbirs data has also been used by U.S. intelligence officials as they continue to unravel the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370), another 777-200ER, that disappeared in March 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. According to information from Malay military radar, the aircraft is thought to have crossed the Malayan peninsula and possibly crashed into the Indian Ocean. A flaperon belonging to the aircraft later washed up on the French overseas territory of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. The aircraft is thought to have flown in an area not highly trafficked, making it easier for Sbirs to find and track the heat signature of a 777-200ER.

Officials at the 460th declined to articulate their role in the search, and U.S. intelligence is unlikely to advertise if and how its data was used, for fear of revealing its capabilities. But Jackson says the team did participate by providing technical data to the intelligence community.

Col. Mike Guetlein, director of the Air Force Space and Missile Center Remote-Sensing Directorate, which oversees the program’s development and production, says satellite IR data is being more routinely used for combat and civil search-and-rescue operations, locating crash survivors or those who perished in crashes. This is made possible because satellite IR data, and Sbirs information in particular, can be collected and processed much faster now. The system can also be used to help direct firefighters to concentrate their resources because it can show areas of the worst hot spots in burn zones.
Guetlein says that if the art for Sbirs operators is in honing their tactics to use the same data in new ways, the science is in the growing set of algorithms used to manipulate data collected by the system. Work in the “battlespace awareness” mission for satellite IR data can take hours today, but that is shrinking quickly thanks to computing advances. “This is where the explosion is happening,” Guetlein says. As Air Force officials work on algorithms and tactics development, the U.S. Army is also working to improve its ability to relay Sbirs data to commanders in the field, pushing it to ever lower levels of command.
The Army is upgrading its mobile Joint Tactical Ground Stations —four locations outside the U.S. used to disseminate Sbirs warning messages—from mobile configurations to a fixed design. It is also conducting a block upgrade to exploit more data from Sbirs GEO satellites as well as DSP, said Army Lt. Gen. David Mann on Aug. 12. The mobile JTAGs are operating, but “not to the degree that we are really maximizing the Sbirs GEO constellation,” he says. “[It is] very, very minimal.” The upgrade, for which Army officials declined to identify a cost, will “allow us to fully capitalize on what Sbirs brings to us, as well as DSP and other data.”
The system can also be helpful beyond its missile warning and defense roles. The Pentagon’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center keeps a catalog of signatures—electromagnetic and IR—of aircraft, missiles and other military hardware operating globally. In a theater such as Syria, a multitude of systems are active, including those from Syria, Russia and forces friendly to the U.S., along with stolen allied systems used by the militant Islamic State. Sbirs can help sort out the chaos on the battlefield by providing one set of data for analysts to correlate with other sources. The system can also provide precise data on the whereabouts of aircraft, possibly validating or dispelling accusations from Turkey about Russian aircraft flying in its airspace, including an allegation that a MiG-29 intercepted Turkish F-16s, for example.


Credit: Lockheed Martin Concept


The number of heat events detected by the system is an indicator of how the Air Force has expanded the use of satellite IR data with Sbirs. The 460th detected 403 missile events in 2014, versus 193  through July 2015. However, while Sbirs operators worked about 8,000 IR events from the Sbirs mission control station at Buckley in all of 2014, they had already worked 7,000 such events through August 2015. The growth is due to a change in the tactics and methods used to detect and characterize events, a significant expansion of the types of events being monitored, says Maj. Greg Vice, director of operations at the 2nd Space Warning Sqdn. at Buckley. This work will be officially supported through a new Joint Overhead Persistent Infrared Battlespace Awareness Cell being established at Buckley and set to go operational in April 2016. It will be staffed by intelligence and Air Force officials and provide its data not only to the intelligence community but also to commanders around the globe via tactical data links.

Inside the Ops Center
This data is separate from the rigid nuclear command-and-control communications used by Sbirs operators to provide certified Integrated Tactical Warning and Attack Assessment (Itwaa) messages for commanders at U.S. Strategic Command. These are the official messages, dispatched in a very specific format, warning of a missile attack; they include information about the threat missile and its anticipated launch point.
For Itwaa messages, each sensor must be precisely certified in a process that is intentionally grueling because of the potentially grave consequences of these messages.
Both Sbirs GEO scanning sensors are Itwaa-certified; the first was certified a full two years after launch. Scanners on the first two HEO sensors are also Itwaa-certified. The starer is slated for this certification as soon as next year.
The gravity of the mission is contrasted by the youth of its operators at Buckley, most of whom were born after the ending of the Cold War that drove development of the missile warning and defense architecture. The average Sbirs operator is about 20 years old and has about six months’ experience working the console. The ops floor is populated by a multinational presence, including British, Australian and Canadian military officials. These operators work 12-hr.shifts, constantly monitoring computer screens. The Sbirs operators are divided into four areas aligned with its four missions: missile defense, missile warning, technical intelligence and battlespace awareness. Though the job can at times be monotonous, Airman 1st Class Cynthia Solorzano says the time often passes quickly, especially when events are reported. Operators must react within seconds of a launch to inform U.S. Strategic Command and alert missile defenses. And the job is made more complex by adversaries’ changing tactics.
More and more, nations are testing their ability to conduct “raid attacks,” firing multiple missiles at once in hopes of overwhelming U.S. sensors and defenses. “We have seen and will continue to see other countries use a ripple launch—a raid launch. . . . We have seen up to 32 launches” in one particular event within the last two years, says Jackson, the ops group commander. “We have to train our operators to handle more than just single, strategic launches. How do we handle multiple launches from multiple locations in a very small, regional conflict? You have to learn how to hand things off as a crew. You have got to learn how to set up your screens differently.”
Aviation Week was invited to tour the new Block 10 operations floor before it is shrouded in classification when operations begin in earnest. It is a modern, wide space littered with computer consoles. Personnel in an intelligence cell are off to the side. A space in the center will be occupied each shift’s director. Large screens loom over the ops center, and shift overseers can display data of their choice, including sources outside Sbirs, such as television news channels.


Credit: Lockheed Martin
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This expansion of the Sbirs mission is occurring just as the Air Force is finally realizing a long-held plan to consolidate Sbirs ground operations in a single ground control center at Buckley. Currently, operations are distributed among locations in Colorado at Boulder, Schriever AFB and Buckley under the original Sbirs ground architecture plan. Operators

Providing Continuous Missile Warning From Space

Oct 16, 2015  | Aviation Week & Space Technology

This Lockheed Martin video depicts how the U.S. Air Force Space-Based Infrared System and the decades-old Defense Support Program predecessor scan every point on Earth at least once every 10 sec. 

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