New-Tech Europe Magazine | June 2016

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New-Tech Magazine l 81
tens of thousands of miles per
hour. The scales and speeds in this
extreme environment are difficult
enough to grasp conceptually, let
alone operationally, as is required
for commanders overseeing the
nation’s increasingly critical space
assets.
Current space domain awareness
tools and technologies were
developed when there were many
fewer objects in space. Only a few
nations could even place satellites
in orbit, and those orbits were
easily predictable without advanced
software tools. That situation has
changed dramatically in the past
decade with a developing space
industry flooding once lonely
orbits with volleys of satellite
constellations. Despite this
much more complex and chaotic
environment, commanders with
responsibility for space domain
awareness often rely on outdated
tools and processes—and thus
incomplete information—as they
plan, assess, and execute U.S.
military operations in space.
To help address these technical
and strategic challenges, DARPA
is launching the first of two planned
efforts under the Agency’s new
Hallmark program, which has
the overarching goal to provide
breakthrough capabilities in U.S.
space command and control. This
first effort, the Hallmark Software
Testbed (Hallmark-ST), has as
its primary goal the creation of
an advanced enterprise software
architecture for a testbed for tools
that will integrate a full spectrum of
real-time space-domain systems
and capabilities. The testbed would
be used to expedite the creation and
assessment of a comprehensive
set of new and improved tools and
technologies that could be spun off
into near-termoperational use for the
Defense Department’s Joint Space
Operations Center (JSpOC) and
Joint Interagency Combined Space
Operations Center (JICSpOC).
A Broad Agency Announcement
(BAA) providing technical details
about Hallmark-ST is available
at and
will be followed in the near future
by a second BAA encompassing
additional Hallmark goals.
“We envision a system that would
fuse information from diverse
sources and vastly reduce the
overall time required to make and
execute decisions and observe
results,” said Brad Tousley, director
of DARPA’s Tactical Technology
Office (TTO), which oversees
Hallmark. “For example, an intuitive
user interface incorporating 3-D
visualization technology would
present complex information in novel
ways and provide commanders
with unprecedented awareness
and comprehension. An advanced
testbed featuring playback and
simulation capabilities would
significantly facilitate research
and development activities,
experiments, and exercises to
evaluate new technologies for their
impact on space command and
control capabilities.”
Specifically, Hallmark-ST seeks to
design, develop, and maintain a
state-of-the-art enterprise software
architecture that would be flexible,
scalable, secure, and capable of
supporting tools and data from
diverse sources. The architecture
would need to support the ability
to model current and future space
situational awarenessandcommand
and control tools, capabilities,
subsystems, and systems, as
well as external capabilities and
interfaces to support air, cyber, land,
and maritime environments.
The enterprise architecture would
be the backbone of a long-term
testbed, the Hallmark Space
Evaluation and Analysis Capability
(SEAC), anticipated to be located
in Northern Virginia. SEAC
would provide for the effective
development, integration, modeling
and simulation, and realistic testing
of software and decision-support
processes relevant to space
command and control. It would
also eventually contribute to the
rapid integration of technology into
future space enterprise command
and control systems. Furthermore,
Hallmark personnel at SEAC would
be integral to the actual integration
of external space command and
control tools, capabilities, and data,
as well as execution of a number
of anticipated tests and scenario-
based exercises.
Questions about Hallmark-ST may
be directed to the Hallmark BAA
coordinator at DARPA-BAA-16-40@
.
Image Caption: DARPA’s new
Hallmark program seeks to provide
improved capabilities to rapidly
plan, assess, and execute the full
spectrum of U.S. military operations
in space. Click below for high-
resolution image.”