Michigan Aerospace Corporation - Threat Assessment and Validation

Michigan Aerospace Corporation has recently completed a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to develop a toolset and architecture for assessment and mitigation of threats to spacecraft. A simulation environment to allow generation of realistic data sets and metrics for testing and comparison of different threat detection and assessment algorithms will also be produced. Our approach differs from previous attempts because it is based on algorithms that are tractable and that utilize actual features in the data sets that can be characterized quantitatively. Although the focus will be to produce the threat assessment, simulation environment, and validation performance metrics, the algorithms will be designed to operate within the larger framework of the Joint Directors of Laboratories (JDL) model for data fusion. One of the outputs of the simulation environment will be a library of anomalous data that can be used to evaluate different detection techniques and quantitatively assess their ability to detect and distinguish between technical, environmental, and actual threats to the spacecraft. The simulation environment will also allow "what if" scenarios through deterministic and non-deterministic adjustments of the input variables. The resulting algorithms will be applicable to a wide variety of data mining problems (e.g., in Signals Intelligence) that require fast execution on very large data sets.