WASHINGTON — Germany will use Lockheed Martin’s space situational awareness software to track objects in space, the company announced.
The German Space Agency opted for the company’s iSpace command and control system, which collects data from government, commercial and scientific sensors all over the world to track thousands of objects in orbit, Lockheed said in an April 6 announcement. The system alerts operators to anomalies or potential collisions and suggests mitigating actions.
“No other system offers real-time catalog maintenance, space event processing and sensor tasking in a highly scalable processing infrastructure for such a variety of sensors,” Amr Hussein, vice president of Lockheed Martin C4ISR Systems, said in a statement.
Lockheed Martin did not disclose the value of the iSpace contract with the Germany Space Agency, known as DLR, its German initials. iSpace will work with German sensors, including the tracking and imaging radar, the German Space Situational Awareness center optical sensor, and the German Experimental Surveillance and Tracking Radar, Lockheed Martin noted.
The U.S. military already uses iSpace, which the company introduced in 2017. For instance, U.S. Strategic Command has used the software in support of its Global Sentinel exercises for space situational awareness.
Moreover, the U.S. Air Force used iSpace to develop its Space Fence, an S-band radar on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. While the military has not revealed the extent of the system’s capabilities, it can track objects smaller than 10 centimeters in low Earth orbit. According to experts, even debris smaller than a centimeter can damage satellites due to its high speed.
Nathan Strout covers space, unmanned and intelligence systems for C4ISRNET.
