“Jackal’s crew produced a validated mission plan in under 30 minutes from tasking,” True Anomaly said in a statement. “Jackal executed ingress and a burn sequence over 23 minutes to close on Puma. When Puma maneuvered away during the approach, Jackal downlinked what it saw, and our team replanned, revalidated, and implemented a new mission plan in rapid succession.”
As Rocket Lab’s Puma backed away, True Anomaly’s Jackal executed more burns to reengage and image its prey. Military and company officials haven’t released any photos from the most recent Victus Haze demo, and they declined to disclose exactly how close the satellites came to one another.
“Due to operational security, further details involving sensor suites for characterization, phenomenology, payloads, distances, or docking will not be shared,” a spokesperson for Space Systems Command said in response to questions from Ars.
True Anomaly’s ground controllers, working out of an operations center in Colorado, managed the maneuvers with the help of an algorithm generating “hyper-accurate” targeting estimates from measurements onboard the Jackal satellite. All of this was done without coordination between True Anomaly and Rocket Lab. “No scripted target behavior,” True Anomaly said.
