AI need for NRO’s efforts to use large constellations of small satellites in the future to fill the huge appetite within the Intelligence Community and the military services for remote sensing data, Director Chris Scolese says.
“The satellites themselves are going to have to be, to some degree, able to take care of themselves. Artificial intelligence and machine learning onboard the satellites to help us control the constellations is absolutely critical,” he told the Virtual Small Satellite Conference yesterday afternoon. “In our case, we’re very interested in resiliency and maintaining the capability of the system through all kinds of conditions. And, in which case, we need to know how are we going to self-heal the architecture. If we suffer any losses for any reason.”“We’re going to want to use data from multiple sources and, you know, just thinking about it, you’re gonna have different look angles, different lighting conditions, a whole bunch of different things we’re going to have to go off and address and coordinate,” he said.
NRO is Its opening its doors to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and other non-traditional sensing capabilities such as the use of radio frequency (RF) transmissions to track targets.