Abstract
The space around the Earth is filled with man-made objects, which orbit the planet at altitudes ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometers. Keeping an eye on all objects in Earth's orbit, useful and not useful, operational or not, is known as Space Surveillance. Due to cost considerations, the space surveillance solutions beyond the Low Earth Orbit region are mainly based on optical instruments. This paper presents a solution for real-time automatic detection and ranging of space objects of altitudes ranging from below the Medium Earth Orbit up to 40,000 km, based on two low cost observation systems built using commercial cameras and marginally professional telescopes, placed 37 km apart, operating as a large baseline stereovision system. The telescopes are pointed towards any visible region of the sky, and the system is able to automatically calibrate the orientation parameters using automatic matching of reference stars from an online catalog, with a very high tolerance for the initial guess of the sky region and camera orientation. The difference between the left and right image of a synchronized stereo pair is used for automatic detection of the satellite pixels, using an original difference computation algorithm that is capable of high sensitivity and a low false positive rate. The use of stereovision provides a strong means of removing false positives, and avoids the need for prior knowledge of the orbits observed, the system being able to detect at the same time all types of objects that fall within the measurement range and are visible on the image.
Highlights
The difference between the left and right image of a synchronized stereo pair is used for automatic detection of the satellite pixels, using an original difference computation algorithm that is capable of high sensitivity and a low false positive rate
In order to test the proposed setup and detection method, almost three hours of observations were performed on 23 October 2012, using a synchronized setup of two sensors composed of telescope, camera, control computer and GPS antenna for time perception
Some examples are shown in Figure 14: the average brightness of the satellites ranges from 15 to 65 DNU, which makes the satellite brighter than the background, which has an average brightness of 5 DNU, but significantly less bright than the stars in the image, which can go up to the saturation value of 255 DNU
Summary
The space around the Earth is filled with man-made objects, which orbit the planet at altitudes ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometers. Other objects are not so useful, and their increased number has become a threat to the safety of space operations, space travel, or even for the planet’s surface, as many of these objects will, one day, fall back to Earth. These objects are collectively known as Space Debris (SD). Detailed surveys on the problem of space debris and space surveillance can be found in [1,2]
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