Marine ASV Range Surveillance System

United States spaceports carry out the critical task of launching and recovering vehicles and payloads. These are extremely unique and expensive assets, and their successful deployment, operation, and recovery are essential to our nation's scientific discovery, economic prosperity, and national security. Surveillance and weather monitoring are significant factors in enabling safe, secure, reliable, and cost effective operations. Ranges encompass large marine regions that are expensive to monitor and not under the exclusive control of the spaceport. Marine regions include backwater areas (lagoon, river, and estuary) near the launch site, as well as the coastal and open-ocean regions extending hundreds of miles downrange. The most hazardous regions must be cleared and maintained clear in preparation for launch and reentry operations to ensure public safety as well as the safety and security of the vehicle itself. To support such operations, Emergent Space Technologies, Inc. (Emergent) proposes to develop the marine autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) range surveillance (MARS) system. MARS is an integrated solution that includes vehicle, payload and ground segments and will support automated collection and transfer of launch range surveillance and weather data. MARS provides enhanced situational awareness to range operators responsible for ensuring public safety, range availability, and mission success.

A wide array of non-NASA government and commercial autonomous marine surveillance and in-situ data collection applications can be supported by the MARS system. Application domains include disaster response, energy, environmental, homeland security, law enforcement, defense, public health and safety, transportation, and weather forecasting. The MARS system offers the potential to decrease operational costs, decrease human workloads, reduce human exposure to hazardous environments, increase situational awareness, enable extended duration observations, and customize temporal and spatial surveillance and monitoring scales across domains. State and local governments tasked with conducting increased surveillance and environmental monitoring activities on increasingly limited budgets are expected to benefit from the MARS system which will ultimately enable more effective use of employees and resources.

The MARS system is being developed to support NASA range surveillance and weather monitoring activities for spacecraft launch and recovery operations. MARS augments existing surveillance operations in the range's expansive marine corridor, which is expensive to monitor, and prone to incursion by commercial and recreational boats. Once developed, the system can support Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) and sounding rocket launches at the GSFC Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and Constellation program launches at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The MARS payload technology can be deployed to other marine platforms including buoys, barges, and ships. When deployed to land-based towers, the technology can be used to monitor launch, processing, and recovery facilities. When paired with appropriate sensors, the MARS system will support autonomous in-situ oceanographic and atmospheric data collection and transmission for NASA Earth science applications including satellite calibration and validation, physical oceanography, algal bloom monitoring, and hurricane research.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 6) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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