NASA has handed a Maryland analytics firm a five-year contract to keep its spacecraft out of each other’s way.
Omitron Inc. won the Orbital Safety Analysis Support Services award, an indefinite-delivery contract valued at roughly $23.5M, the agency said Sept. 29. The work covers conjunction assessment screening for every uncrewed NASA spacecraft, support for human spaceflight, and orbital safety analysis for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Space Commerce.
That last piece carries growing weight. The Office of Space Commerce is the civilian body building the country’s traffic coordination service for commercial operators, a role that rests on the same collision-warning analysis NASA buys for its own fleet.
The screening is run from a mix of civil and military sites. Omitron’s own Beltsville offices anchor the work, with NASA centers and installations in Virginia and Colorado playing supporting roles.
Conjunction screening is the unglamorous half of space domain awareness. An operator needs a prediction of how close two objects will pass, how much confidence to place in it, and how much time remains to maneuver. With more satellites and more debris sharing the same altitudes, close approaches keep multiplying, and each one spends propellant and crew attention that cannot be recovered.
Cheap, continuous warning is what turns a debris field from a surprise into a schedule. That is the capability the contract buys.
