At a mountaintop event in New Mexico, DARPA handed off ownership of its Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) from an Agency-led design and construction program to ownership and operation by U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), which operate the telescope in Australia jointly with the Australian government.
SST has moved space situational awareness from seeing only a few large objects at a time through the equivalent of a drinking straw, to a “windshield” view with 10,000 objects at a time, each as small as a softball.
SST can search an area larger than the continental United States in seconds and survey the entire geosynchronous belt within its field of view—one quarter of the sky—multiple times in one night.
