WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force has completed the deployment of two space-surveillance sensors aboard Japanese navigation satellites, expanding its ability to monitor objects in geosynchronous orbit through a bilateral program that uses allied spacecraft and launch systems to field U.S. military payloads.
Japan’s H3 rocket launched the second sensor Aug. 10 aboard Quasi-Zenith Satellite 7, completing the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System-Hosted Payload program, or QZSS-HP, a national security space partnership established by the United States and Japan under a 2020 agreement.
The U.S.-owned space domain awareness payload, designed and built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, was integrated and tested with its Japanese host satellite over a two-year period before launch, the Space Force’s Space Systems Command said Aug. 14.
With QZS-7 now in orbit, the U.S. payload will be operated by Mission Delta 2, the Space Force organization responsible for space domain awareness. The sensor was placed in geosynchronous orbit over the Indo-Pacific region, and its observations will be fed in near real time into the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, the collection of sensors used by the military to detect, track and characterize satellites and other objects in orbit.
“QZSS-HP is a key contributor to help us meet the threat of peer adversaries in space and build towards resilient capabilities to detect, understand and maintain custody of objects in deep space,” Col. Gina Peterson, deputy commander of Mission Delta 2 – Space Domain Awareness, said in a statement.
The Aug. 10 mission follows the launch of the first U.S. sensor aboard Japan’s QZS-6 satellite on Feb. 2, 2025, also aboard an H3 rocket. Together, the two launches complete the deployment envisioned under the QZSS-HP agreement signed in December 2020 between the Space Force and Japan’s National Space Policy Secretariat.
Both U.S. payloads were developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Their Japanese host satellites were built by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. in Kamakura, Japan, as part of the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, Japan’s satellite navigation network designed to augment the U.S. Global Positioning System and improve positioning, navigation and timing services in Japan and the surrounding region.
The U.S. sensors perform a separate mission from the satellites’ navigation payloads, providing the Space Force with additional vantage points for observing spacecraft at high altitudes.
The program represents a deeper form of allied space cooperation than simply exchanging surveillance data. A U.S.-owned operational military sensor is integrated with a Japanese government spacecraft, launched aboard a Japanese rocket and then incorporated into the U.S. military’s space domain awareness architecture.
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