WASHINGTON, DC –
The National Reconnaissance Office is working to advance cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence and quantum sensing, to better meet the demands of its customers, NRO Director Chris Scolese said at an aerospace industry forum Thursday.
“Everybody wants information faster,” Dr. Scolese said at the Goddard Space Science Symposium hosted by the American Astronautical Society. “And while we can get data to the ground faster, and we can process it on the ground fast, and then we can distribute it fast, they want it even faster than that.”
To meet those demands, over the past few years, the NRO has added capability, resilience, and speed to its overhead architecture through the launch of more than 200 satellites. Many of these are part of a proliferated architecture – multiple satellites operating as a system, allowing for shorter revisit times and greater capacity for collecting data.
“It's not a [single] satellite anymore,” he said. “When you talk about a capability, it is however many satellites that you need to do it. It's the whole constellation that you're delivering.”
The NRO’s proliferated architecture is collecting a magnitude more data, so processing that much information demands new technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a key role – both in processing the information and in ensuring the information can be trusted.
“Obviously, we support the warfighter, but we also support policymakers. We also support analysts, we also support first responders, we also support environmentalists,” Dr. Scolese said. “And as you can imagine, they all want data in different formats, and they're interested in maybe the same location and maybe the same data set, but they want it in a different way. So AI is helping us. But in all those places, the challenge is to make sure that whatever we're doing is understandable and auditable, so they can go back and say, yes, it came from this point and it ended up here.”
A second area of focus is quantum sensing and getting the technology into space. Dr. Scolese said the NRO is partnering with commercial entities and universities and investing in areas like quantum photonics, quantum detectors, radio frequency detectors, and lasers that can play a role. “It offers so many opportunities for us to not only detect things very accurately and in a way that is unambiguous and much easier to calibrate than you can with other means. But it also is going to provide us additional insights in any areas that we're looking at, from science to policy matters.”
To achieve these objectives, Dr. Scolese noted the NRO depends on an innovative and dedicated workforce that’s constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
“A few years ago, if you would have asked me if we would have 200 satellites up there, I would have thought that was a dream. But now we talk about 200 satellites as if it's no big deal, 1,000 satellites as if it's a no big deal,” he said. “We're really looking for people who want to develop things and advance things and keep that innovative spirit going all the time.”
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