U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center. Photo: USAF

Ball Aerospace was selected to build an adaptable, open-source framework testbed to support ground processing needs for the U.S. Air Force‘s Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC). This prototype works with third-party processing applications and helps visualize the time-critical processing performance in satellite ground systems, ensuring timely and reliable missile warnings, battlespace awareness, and technical intelligence.

The Mission Data Processing Application Framework (MDPAF) testbed enables data to be collected for the Air Force’s Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution (FORGE) program for Overhead Persistent InfraRed (OPIR) ground processing. OPIR is crucial for the U.S. Air Force and decision makers to understand threats and make time-critical decisions, while gathering long-term technical intelligence data on foreign missile systems.

“Ball will leverage a modern system design approach which merges development, security and operations, known as DevSecOps, or DevOps with security built into the process,” said Ball Aerospace Systems Engineering Solutions Vice President (VP) and General Manager Steve Smith. “We will begin with the practices and services Ball developed for DARPA’s Hallmark program and adapt them to the mission needs of SMC.”