{"id":177481,"date":"2023-12-05T17:28:41","date_gmt":"2023-12-05T23:28:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/u-s-air-force-grants-5-million-for-research-on-space-object-detection"},"modified":"2023-12-05T17:28:41","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T23:28:41","slug":"u-s-air-force-grants-5-million-for-research-on-space-object-detection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/u-s-air-force-grants-5-million-for-research-on-space-object-detection","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Air Force Grants $5 Million for Research on Space Object Detection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/u-s-air-force-grants-5-million-for-research-on-space-object-detection.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Can technology be developed to identify small objects in space? This is something the U.S. Air Force hopes to address and they <a href=\"https:\/\/news.gsu.edu\/2023\/12\/04\/georgia-state-professor-granted-5m-to-identify-and-characterize-objects-in-space\/\">recently awarded<\/a> a $5 million grant to a Georgia State University professor with the goal of identifying, charting, and imaging small objects in space, also known as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ssc.spaceforce.mil\/Program-Executive-Offices\/Space-Domain-Awareness-Combat-Power\">Space Domain Awareness (SDA)<\/a>. This grant holds the potential to improve SDA regarding small objects between the Earth and the Moon, which could benefit national security as well as observational astronomy.<\/p>\n<p>This grant comes as the <a href=\"https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/grapher\/yearly-number-of-objects-launched-into-outer-space\">number of objects launched into space<\/a> continues to increase every year. For example, while the total of objects launched into space worldwide in 2016 was 221, that number jumped to 456 in 2017, experienced a slight decrease to 454 in 2018, increased to 586 in 2019, but then experienced massive spikes to 1,274 in 2020, 1,813 in 2021, and 2,478 in 2022, more than a tenfold increase in six years. So many objects not only pose threats to observational astronomy but to national security, as well.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDetecting objects in the space region between where many communications satellites are located extending to the distance at which the Moon orbits the Earth presents a substantial challenge,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/news-releases\/1010027\">said Dr. Stuart Jefferies<\/a>, who is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State University, and recipient of the grant. \u201cThe faintness of these objects makes observation difficult using ground-based telescopes, as they are starved of photons from the target of interest, creating a potential vulnerability that adversaries could exploit.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Can technology be developed to identify small objects in space? This is something the U.S. Air Force hopes to address and they recently awarded a $5 million grant to a Georgia State University professor with the goal of identifying, charting, and imaging small objects in space, also known as Space Domain Awareness (SDA). This grant [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":706,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2028,1492],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-satellites","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/706"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}