A powerful space telescope designed to quickly spot fast moving spy satellites; small space debris (and even alien spacecraft?) has been turned over to the U.S. Air Force by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

With the handover, the Space Surveillance Telescope or SST officially becomes a sensor in the Space Surveillance Network of the Air Force Space Command (AFSC). Operational use of the SST, however, won't begin until 2020 after the system is moved to Australia.

Like Us on Facebook

AFSC, a major command of the United States Air Force, supports U.S. military operations worldwide through the use of many different types of satellite, launch and cyber operations.

SST will be operated by AFSC in cooperation with the Royal Australian Air Force to officially track debris floating around space about 36,000 kilometers from Earth, which is a location called geostationary orbit (GEO).

SST has a 3.5 meter aperture mirror and came online in 2011. It's a ground based, advanced optical system for the detection and tracking of faint objects in space such as asteroids. It also conducts space defense missions that protect the United States.

SST is designed to expand space situational awareness, and to quickly provide wide area search capability.

"SST has about an order of magnitude better performance than the existing space surveillance network," which is the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS), said Lindsay Millard, DARPA's program manager.

Three technologies help contribute to that performance. The telescope incorporates the steepest curved primary telescope mirror ever made, which can collect light across a wider field of view.

The first-ever "curved charge coupled device" for the camera provides clear imagery, and its fast shutter speed allows it to take a greater number of photos.

Previous space telescopes could only see a couple large objects from a very narrow field of view, the equivalent of looking through a drinking straw. SST broadens that to a "windshield" view that can see 10,000 objects as small as a softball at the same time.

It also can conduct surveillance quickly, with a scan of an area the size of the continental United States taking only seconds. It can survey its entire field of view, which amounts to about one quarter of the sky, several times per night. 

TagsSpace Surveillance Telescope, SST, U.S. Air Force, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, Air Force Space Command