Australia, a country in the south of Indonesia, is fairly comprehensive in defense matters. Not only anticipating conventional threats from countries in the north, Australia has long been prepared to respond to threats from outer space.
Not to deal with aliens, but the Continent has adapted to make observations on foreign objects in outer space that have the potential to threaten national interests.
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What is meant by a foreign object in this case is a spy satellite that lurks in low Earth orbit, until it is ready to anticipate an intercontinental ballistic missile attack. Together with the United States, Australia now operates the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST).
The SST gives Australia's detection capabilities of distant objects in outer space. The SST is designed to detect, track and identify debris and satellites at an altitude of more than 22,000 miles (35,405 km) above the earth's surface.
And it is still related to Australia's space situational awareness (SSA) on foreign objects in outer space. Quoted from Breakingdefense.com (24/10/2022), the Australian private defense company based in Adelaide, Silentium Defense, has launched a type of passive space radar in a tracking container for objects in low orbit.
"We're talking about a space observatory container that includes the power supply, generator, battery, all the computers, all the antennas that fit inside," said Silentium CEO James Palmer. "This system can be placed in an area where you want to get coverage, spread out the aperture and in half a day you're up and running, silently observing elements in low-Earth orbit." Because it is a passive radar that does not emit any radio waves to make it a target.
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| Lockheed Martin's Space Fence on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands |
Silentium Defense plans to unveil its new system at the Australian Space Forum in Adelaide. Passive radar works by tracking the reflection of objects from FM radio waves. Multiples of relatively inexpensive systems can be applied worldwide to track diverse objects as they are connected to a network.
For perspective, there are far more advanced systems out there, like Lockheed Martin's Space Fence on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Spance Fence can track objects as small as marbles, while the Silentium system is designed to track objects larger than 10 centimeters.
However, the US Space Fence uses a 10 megawatt power plant, is static in the ground station and provides emissions that enemies can use to track and target it. Space Fence uses a Gallium Nitride (GaN) powered S-band radar. Transistors operate at higher temperatures, frequencies and voltages. For information, the 10 megawatt station can power 1,640 homes in America.
Meanwhile, the space tracking system from Silentium has the advantage of mobility and cannot be tracked by opponents. The Silentium system uses a portable generator that is relatively small for power.
However, Silentium Defense's solution is not without its drawbacks, the system relies on an external source of FM radio signals, say from terrestrial radio stations, bouncing off the satellites. That means it can be difficult to use in very remote areas where those signals are few and far between. , and it won't track small objects.
Tracking the increasingly dense regions of space in low-Earth orbit has become much more important as commercial, civilian, and military satellites are dispersed in large numbers.
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One interesting fact, this Australian object tracking system is free of license to other countries, because it has been fully developed in Australia. This means that it can be directly exported to any country approved by Australia, without first obtaining permission from the United States.
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