Description
With Earth's orbits set to become increasingly congested over the next several decades, the need for precise ephemeris of both active and defunct objects is crucial to ensure collision avoidance and the continued use of the space environment. Existing satellite tracking techniques have their advantages and limitations, including high costs, reduced precision at high orbital altitudes (radar), only detecting actively transmitting targets (antenna arrays), or the need for slow-moving targets (large telescopes). Recent advancements in COTS instrumentation, specifically CMOS sensors, now enable low-cost, high-cadence, small optical systems to be used for satellite tracking. We present a two-telescope system for photometry and precise, Kalman filter driven, orbital determination of space objects using parallax for range determination. An observation campaign was conducted in August 2024 on La Palma using a Planewave L350 direct-drive mount and a Celestron 11" RASA with a QHY600M CMOS, CLASP, a University of Warwick telescope. A twin portable system was designed with a custom-made mounting solution deployed on location to provide variable parallax baselines. Two distances of 2 km and 1.6 km were tested during three nights of observations, with over 250 targets ranging from LEO to upper MEO. With the use of parallax measurements, we derive both along-track, cross-track and range measurements. A novel processing technique for extracting the astrometry and photometry from highly streaked stars was created for image analysis.
