Satnews Daily
February 10th, 2020

Orbit Logic Dealt Into DARPA's Blackjack Team


Orbit Logic has announced that the company is a member of the Scientific Systems Company, Inc. (SSCI), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Blackjack Pit Boss team.

The DARPA Blackjack program aims to demonstrate the capabilities of a Proliferated Low Earth orbit (P-LEO) system through a variety of on-orbit experiments using 20, low-cost smallsats, each carrying payloads relevant to select military missions.

Pit Boss is the computing and encryption hardware and modular software element of Blackjack that is intended to enable Tasking, Collection, Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (TCPED) to occur autonomously on-orbit within the P-LEO constellation at mission speed.

Orbit Logic is contributing software and engineering services for both ground software and flight software portions of SSCI’s Pit Boss solution.

Orbit Logic will provide space system autonomy software expertise to the SSCI team with knowledge derived from development of their Autonomous Planning System (APS) flight software and SpyMeSat ground software. APS enables autonomous onboard planning and re-planning in response to data requests and events, including coordination between satellites.

Orbit Logic’s SpyMeSat is a commercially available mobile app that enables users with the ability to browse and request commercial imagery data products and request new imagery tasks, while providing situational awareness of all on-orbit assets.

SSCI VP of Research and Development, Dr. Owen Brown, said that the company is incredibly fortunate to have Orbit Logic as a part of the team. Their proven space software products and innovative, highly experienced engineering staff are vital assets for the firm's development of a complex, first of its kind, autonomy system for satellite constellations.