As adversary space capabilities continue to advance and challenge established patterns of behavior, the need to improve awareness of activities in the geostationary (GEO) belt has become increasingly critical. Current limitations in the ability to detect, characterize, and respond to unexpected maneuvers in GEO create risk of operational surprise. The space domain is becoming more congested and contested, driving demand for persistent, wide-area surveillance capabilities that can autonomously identify, track, and provide timely alerts on objects of interest. Existing space-based Space Domain Awareness (SDA) capabilities, such as the joint NRO–USSF SILENTBARKER mission, provide a reference point for current approaches to GEO object detection, custody, and indications and warning. While these capabilities demonstrate important advances in SDA, evolving threats, mission complexity, and operational demands highlight the need to explore additional sensing concepts that could enhance persistence, responsiveness, and resilience beyond the current state of the art. There is a recognized gap in the availability of scalable, wide-field-of-view sensing solutions capable of providing continuous, wide-area GEO surveillance. Current architectures rely on a limited number of sensors optimized for focused observation, which can constrain coverage, revisit rates, and responsiveness. Commercially derived Wide-Field-of-View (WFOV) Electro-Optical (EO) payloads offer the potential to complement existing SDA approaches by enabling broader search volumes, higher revisit rates, and increased autonomy while leveraging commercial innovation to improve affordability and scalability. This topic seeks innovative WFOV EO payload concepts that can support autonomous GEO-belt search, dynamic tasking, and generation of actionable data suitable for integration with complementary SDA and reconnaissance systems. Solutions should consider the operational challenges of GEO surveillance, including solar exclusion constraints, thermal and radiation environments, platform integration considerations, and compatibility with existing command, control, and data-processing architectures. The long-term vision of this topic is to inform future space-based SDA architectures by identifying viable, commercially derived WFOV EO payload approaches that could enhance persistent GEO surveillance, reduce decision timelines, and improve the ability to maintain custody of critical space objects in support of U.S. Space Force mission needs. References to existing SDA systems are provided for contextual understanding only and do not imply a commitment to transition or acquisition.
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