Raytheon’s Jane Chappell: Satellite Ground Stations, Automated Tech Can Support Intell Missions

Jane Chappell, vice president of global intelligence solutions at Raytheon, has said ground stations and automated technologies could help the U.S. military and intelligence community utilize small and large satellites, Breaking Defense reported Monday.

“I will tell you, if you do the ground efficiently, constellations of small sats will be able to take on some of the missions we task the big satellites with today,” Chappell told Breaking Defense.

She noted that ground terminals would allow small sats to take some tasks designated to larger spacecraft, which could then free up big satellites to support other vital missions.

Raytheon is promoting a new approach called “sensemaking,” which the company describes as integration of automation into data workflow.

Chappell said an automated technology can also support natural language processing, automatic detection of planes and ships in imagery, data discovery or activity pattern recognition and data labelling techniques for activity-based intelligence.