Persistent Wide Field Space Surveillance

ABSTRACT: This Phase II effort will design and integrate a prototype system, demonstrating the WFOV surveillance system performance predictions developed in Phase I. A scalable, multi camera control/image processing software package will be integrated with a camera array. The system will detect and characterize space objects by exploiting an multi-aperture approach detailed and verified in Phase I. The Phase II system demonstrates a space surveillance approach that eliminates complex gimbal pointing system requirements, and is easily transported to any location. The scalable system design allows the limiting detection magnitude to be increased, and is highly scalable to increase the area searched in a given time. The system cost goal is less than $1M for building production systems that are easily installed at Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sites. Astrometric information will be derived from the system's passively collected data, and resulting orbit determination data will be handed to large aperture SSN fixed sites for further investigation and characterization.; BENEFIT: The applications for commercial opportunity for wide field of view object detection systems are collision avoidance and health monitoring for commercial owned and operated satellites. The development of a wide field of view object detection system from this project opens the door for faster cost effective and simpler object detection systems. Wide field of view object detection systems will cue dedicated astronomical telescopes once an object is detected for higher resolution imagery. Wide field of view object detection systems developed by Tau are portable, self-contained, and weather proof. The systems will be located in any desirable location that has communication access using machine to machine (M2M) technology such as accessing internet via wireless communications.