Abstract: The start of the 21st century has included multiple demonstrations of national capabilities to disrupt or destroy satellites. Kinetic anti-satellite weapons, in particular, can create debris with long-term consequences for all space actors. The United States relies on satellites for a broad array of civil, scientific, and national security capabilities. There are several possible ways for the U.S. to help build a more secure environment in Earth-orbit, and manage future risks to space systems. This talk will focus on a technical option that can be pursued unilaterally by the U.S.: the use of distributed satellite architectures for certain critical sensing capabilities. This talk will provide some context for space security in 2014, describe existing frameworks for quantifying risk to satellite constellations, and present a framework for analyzing satellite architecture choices for systems like weather and strategic warning satellites.

About the Speaker: Matt Daniels is an engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center, a predoctoral fellow at CISAC, and a Ph.D. candidate in decision and risk analysis at Stanford. He joined CISAC as a predoctoral fellow in September 2012. At Stanford, Matt's research is in dynamic programming models of distributed satellite constellations. His work focuses on developing probabilistic models to assess the viability of constellations of small, networked satellites for scientific and national security missions. At NASA Ames, Matt is an engineer in the Mission Design Center and works with the Office of the Director on international technical collaborations. He has helped create NASA-DARPA partnerships on new space projects and has been a member of NASA delegations to Europe, South America, and the Middle East.