India’s First Commercial Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Observatory

Why in the News?

Digantara, a space sector start-up in India, is going to set up India’s first commercial space situational awareness observatory in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand.

Key Points:

About

What is Space Situational Awareness (SSA)?

• SSA is the science of tracking objects (man-made and natural) that are in orbit and also predicting where they would be at a given point in time
• It plays a crucial role in ensuring safe and sustainable space activities complying with domestic and international guidelines, standards and other norms.
•  SSA generally covers the following three main areas:

• Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) of man-made objects.
• Space Weather (SWE) monitoring and forecast.
• Near-Earth Objects (NEO) monitoring (only natural space objects).

• Directorate of Space Situational Awareness and Management (DSSAM) has been established at ISRO as a nodal centre for Space Situational Awareness (SSA)

Utility

• SSA observatory will help India track any activity in space including that of space debris and military satellites hovering over the region.
• It will fill the crucial gap in SSA observations in the region as there is a lack of such facilities between Australia and southern Africa.
• It would help improve India’s ability to monitor events occurring in deep space, especially in the geostationary, medium-Earth, and high-Earth orbits.
• The observatory will also give India indigenous capabilities to monitor space activity over the subcontinent.
• SSA is helpful in tracking space weather. 
• Prediction of threats from asteroids and meteorites