COLORADO SPRINGS—The U.S. Space Force expects to launch its delayed Wide Field of View missile warning satellite “very soon” after being indefinitely delayed due to undisclosed issues.
The launch, USSF-12 aboard an Atlas V, was delayed in early March because of a “customer request,” United Launch Alliance said at the time. Col. Brian Denaro, the program executive officer of space sensing for Space Systems Command, said there were “some issues” that necessitated the delay, but those are being resolved “here in the very near term.”
The Millennium Space Systems-designed wide-field-of-view satellite, which has a sensor designed by L3Harris Technologies, will “add great capability for our missile warning and missile tracking architecture. It’s also gonna teach us a lot about what we can do with that new sensor technology,” Denaro said at the Space Symposium here.
The satellite was delivered to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Feb. 2. It is a rideshare mission, with other undisclosed payloads set to ride on the Atlas V.
These lessons will help SSC design new proliferated low Earth orbit architectures and sensors, Denaro says.
“It’s gonna be a great tech demonstrator for the architecture and community writ large,” he says.
