Speaker
Description
The growing population of Resident Space Objects (RSOs) poses increasing challenges for Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) and, more broadly, for Space Situational Awareness (SSA). The Low Earth Orbit (LEO) environment is already highly congested, and the rapid deployment of commercial mega-constellations is expected to further increase the number of active and inactive objects requiring monitoring. At the same time, renewed lunar exploration initiatives, including the Artemis program, are extending operational activity beyond traditional Earth orbits into cislunar space, introducing new observational and tracking requirements. In this context, optical observations provide a cost-effective and scalable solution for tracking space objects. Although optical systems are constrained by visibility conditions and by the availability of priori information for target acquisition. However, they remain the most practical and, in some regimes, the only feasible option for observing objects in high-altitude Earth orbits and cislunar and lunar space.
This work investigates innovative strategies for two particularly challenging observational scenarios: daylight optical observations and observations of objects above the GEO region up to lunar distances. It investigates the adopted sensor configuration for daytime observations, which enables clear object detection over most of the pass for several LEO targets. A detailed assessment of the operational viability of the proposed approach is performed by presenting different observational cases with different illumination conditions. The work also reports observation tests carried out in very high elliptical orbits and cislunar regime, aimed at evaluating the feasibility of detecting and measuring objects at distances exceeding 40,000 km.
A further contribution to this work concerns the tracking of uncatalogued objects in the absence of reliable a-priori orbital information. While optical survey observations often allow only the detection of unknown targets, they do not always provide sufficient measurements for orbital determination and cataloguing. To address this limitation, a stare-and-chase strategy is proposed, enabling real-time tracking immediately after detection and thus improving data collection for subsequent orbit determination. These approaches expand the operational capabilities of optical sensors and support future SSA/SST needs in increasingly complex framework around the Earth.
| Which section would you like to submit your abstract to? | Session 2: “Challenges of space debris modelling” |
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