A National Reconnaissance Office payload launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, in April 2022.
COLORADO SPRINGS—The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) expects to ultimately launch multiple satellites to provide space situational awareness in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) as part of an ongoing joint program with the U.S. Space Force.
The NRO and Space Force will launch the SilentBarker satellite later this year, the result of a several yearslong development process that began under the predecessor Air Force Space Command. SilentBarker is designed to search, detect and track objects from a space-based sensor for custody and event detection, budget documents show.
“We’re going to launch later on this year to get a better understanding of what’s going on in the GEO belt,” NRO Director Christopher Scolese told reporters April 18 at the Space Symposium here.
Scolese would not specify how many SilentBarker satellites there will be, saying he is confident there will be more that one.
“The goal is to get a better understanding of what’s in the GEO belt and this is the first set that we’ll be looking at, and we need to go off and see what we see,” Scolese says. “But I would expect that we’re going to find out that it’s a very useful capability and we’ll see additional satellites.”
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