Page 23 - Australian Defence Magazine Dec21-Jan22

DECEMBER 2021-JANUARY 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
DEFENCE BUSINESS SOUTHERN GUARDIAN 23
ational awareness work. Elsewhere in Australia, UTas also manages sites in Katherine in the Northern Territory, Cedu- na in South Australia and Yarragadee in Western Australia.
The University has also received a grant from the Austra- lian Space Agency to construct a new 7.3-metre antenna at a location about 40 kilometres away from the two large an- tennas (the Greenhill Observatory outside Hobart), which will be used both to support low-Earth orbit missions and as a component in a bistatic radar system – an Australian- first capability which involves transmitting from one an- tenna and detecting the reflected signals at one or more remote antennas.
“UTas has a very long history in doing this. It’s not five years, its 20 plus years,” Scott Reeman, HENSOLDT’s Vice President Tasmania and General Manager Strategy ANZ, said to ADM. “UTas’ expertise is quite phenomenal given the relative immaturity of space as a focus area in Australia.”
“The geography is right, the political will is right, and the expertise is right, and you bring all of those together (to give Tasmania a unique competitive advantage in SDA).”
Southern Guardian will harness UTas’ continental net- work of sensors, coupled with the data analytical software and C4ISR capabilities that HENSOLDT Australia pro- vides, to track, categorise and identify objects and potential
threats. HENSOLDT Australia’s Hobart facility, officially opened in July 2021, will be the project’s centre for systems integration and data analysis.
“What we’re looking at here is not just a single element of SDA but being able to look at all the orbits from LEO, MEO, GEO and lunar – and a couple of the assets are quite capable of tracking well beyond lunar – all of which are becoming more and more important to Defence in their recognition of space as a warfighting domain,” Reeman continued.
HENSOLDT Australia has also provided funding for a three-year PhD project that will see UTas researcher David Smith assess how the university’s telescopes can best be used for both passive and active SDA, with a particular fo- cus on targeted, high-sensitivity type applications.
“It’s one of those things where there’s lots of different possibilities, and we’re spending a bit of the time at the mo- ment identifying which ones of those are the best ones to pursue and for further investment and investigation,” Pro- fessor Ellingsen said.
ABOVE: The Hobart/Mt Pleasant 26m antenna
UTAS