The current UK’s National Space and Security Policy states that the identification of potential on-orbit collisions and warning of re-entries over UK sovereign territory is of high importance, driving requirements for indigenous Space Situational Awareness (SSA) systems capable of delivering these products.
The UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) is examining options for the creation of a distributed network of longitudinally distributed, low cost commercial–off-the-shelf electro-optical sensors to support survey work and catalogue maintenance. To effectively exploit this, a robust data handling system is required to autonomously detect satellite trails in a manner that can handle variable target intensities, periodicities and rates of apparent motion, as well as meteors and aircraft. Data captured during the United Kingdom/New Zealand Automated Transfer Vehicle-5 (ATV-5) deorbit observation trial have been employed to inform the development of a prototype processing pipeline for autonomous on-site processing. The approach taken employs pre-existing and documented tools such as Astrometry.NET and DAOPHOT from the astronomical community, together with image processing and orbit determination software developed in-house by Dstl. Some preliminary results from the automated analysis of data collected from wide angle sensors are described, together with an appraisal of the limitations of the proposed system and our plans for future development
AUTOMATED EXTRACTION OF SATELLITE TRAILS FROM WIDE ANGLE CCD IMAGERY
