Anduril Industries revealed yesterday a satellite sensor that can track spacecraft trying to hide their maneuvers in the darkness of Earth's shadow, closing a long-standing blind spot in space surveillance.
The oven-sized Anduril-216 satellite, funded with the company's own capital and launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission in July, carries a long-wave infrared sensor that detects the heat signatures of objects in orbit. It flies roughly 590 kilometers above Earth and spends about a third of every orbit in darkness, giving its infrared imager the chance to work when optical systems go dark.
Ground-based radars and optical telescopes have long struggled to keep watch on satellites passing through orbital night, so a spacecraft can maneuver during an eclipse and vanish from tracking. The new sensor detects that activity in full dark using imaging technology drawn from Anduril's autonomous weapons, giving monitors a way to hold custody of a target through the shadow.
The Space Force tracks satellites for two reasons: to flag when an adversary moves one in a threatening manner, and to warn operators of possible collisions. With no ground sensors inside rival nations' territory and visible-light systems useless in eclipse, that window has been a persistent vulnerability.
Anduril, which acquired satellite-tracking firm ExoAnalytic Solutions earlier this year, is now positioning itself to sell space domain awareness data to the US military rather than entire satellites. The same sensor could eventually inspect other spacecraft up close and extend its reach as far as cislunar space near the Moon.