True Anomaly detailed a space-to-space pursuit between the Rocket Lab-built Puma spacecraft and the True Anomaly Jackal-0004 spacecraft as part of the Victus Haze mission for the U.S. Space Force.
Victus Haze is a Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) mission for Space Systems Command (SSC), in which Rocket Lab quickly launched the mission in June, less than 17 hours after receiving the command from SSC.
Rocket Lab’s launch carried a spacecraft based on its Pioneer platform called “Puma,” while True Anomaly’s Jackal-0004 spacecraft was already in orbit after launching on a prior SpaceX rideshare mission. In orbit, the goal of Victus Haze goal is to demonstrate space domain awareness (SDA) and characterization capabilities, and for the spacecraft to dynamically engage with each other.
Wednesday, True Anomaly detailed the recent space-to-space pursuit in which True Anomaly was tasked by SSC on July 14. The team put together a mission plan in less than 30 minutes. Jackal-004 then executed what’s known as uncooperative rendezvous proximity operations (RPO) — the Puma spacecraft maneuvered away, and Jackal performed maneuvers to reach the spacecraft and capture imagery. The mission used the company’s Mosaic ground system and software.
True Anomaly called the demonstration the first space-to-space pursuit of an evading target.
“This mission demonstrated Jackal’s ability to seamlessly execute and transition between open- and closed-loop tracking based on the mission objectives and phases of execution. Our Multi-Object Detection and Tracking (MODT) algorithm performed flawlessly and proved that it can rapidly generate hyper-accurate target orbit state estimates from onboard measurements,” True Anomaly said.
This is a further milestone for the Victus Haze mission. True Anomaly previously detailed Jackal circumnavigated and captured imagery and characterization of Puma within hours of its launch into an unknown orbit.
