Slingshot Aerospace awarded contract for the development of an IA that identifies satellites behaving strangely

DARPA has granted a new contract to Slingshot Aerospace for the development of their IA system Agatha, whose aim is to identify strangely behaving satellites within large satellite constellations, as they could indicate space weapons or other threats. As the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit is increasing, it’s harder to spot potential threats, and to do so, the AI system was trained by first running a series of virtual scenarios to show how well Agatha could detect anomalies, applying then the IA to satellite constellations already in space. According to Dylan Kesler, director of data science and AI at Slingshot Aerospace, the tests were successful, and Agatha identified satellites within those real-world constellations that were suffering faults or that were changing their mission, to the point that in a couple of instances, the satellite operator only learned of the anomalies after hearing from the company. The system aims to detect strange behaviors in the satellites as soon as possible so that relevant parties can investigate their causes.