U.S. Air Force Taps MIT's Lincoln Lab for ORS-5 Mission

摘要

The U.S. Air Force's rapid response military space office will ask the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory to design and build a satellite to bridge a potential gap in on-orbit space surveillance capabilities, according to a July 30 press release from the service. According to the release, the Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Office, based at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, will ask Lincoln Labs to build an operational demonstration of the SensorSat satellite to scan the geosynchronous-orbit belt from low Earth orbit. The program is expected to start in 2016 and launch in 2017. Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, told a House panel in April that a planned ORS-5 mission would be a technology pathfinder for a follow-on to the current Space Based Space Surveillance satellite. That mission, which keeps watch on the geosynchronous-orbit belt 36,000 kilometers above the equator, is expected to end around 2017.