"This isn’t some hypothetical problem," says Audrey Schaffer, vice president of strategy and policy at Slingshot Aerospace, which developed the new AI"We think this tool is very powerful for addressing new term security challenges," Schaffer says.The system — called Agatha — identifies anomalous behavior in a constellation and then deduces the strategies and intentions of suspect satellites, the company says.
That includes a satellite that's heavier or lighter than the rest with different maneuvering characteristics, which could indicate it is carrying a different payload, Schaffer said. "We are rapidly approaching a moment where no human or team of humans would be able to monitor all activity in space let alone these minute differences," Schaffer says.Constellations are relative newcomers to space, which meant the team at Slingshot didn't have massive amounts of data with which to train the system's algorithms.