Speaker
Description
The ever-growing competition in space exploration has led to the accumulation of a great number of space debris in orbit, which constitutes a threat to active satellites, manned missions and the future of space exploration. To complement ground based Space Situational Awareness (SSA) networks composed of surveillance telescopes, radars and laser stations there is a growing interest in using space-based sensors that can provide almost real-time space based information on space resident objects in Earth orbits.
The CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) is a partnership between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Switzerland with important contributions by 10 additional ESA Member States. It is the first S-class mission in the ESA Science Programme and has been flying on a Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit since December 2019, collecting millions of short-exposure images in the visible domain to study exoplanet properties. A small but increasing fraction of CHEOPS images shows linear trails caused by resident space objects (RSO) crossing the instrument field of view. Although these trails are not useful to the science mission they can be used as serendipitous and important information for space surveillance purposes.
A line detection and analysis algorithm has been created to study the entire data set presently stored by CHEOPS. Currently, more than 5000 streaks have been detected, of which around 2000 correspond to unidentified objects in the present public catalogue from US SpaceTrack. This large number of trail detections enabled us to find interesting trends in the RSO population. These stem from brightness analysis of the lines and the corresponding estimation of the albedo of catalogued objects.
The work developed here shows that present space-based observatories in LEO to MEO orbits can provide very useful information for space surveillance monitoring without major changes to their primary scientific mission. It also works as a proof of concept for future space-based surveillance of RSOs and the space debris field. With the first CHEOPS mission extension currently running until the end of 2026, and a possible second extension until the end of 2029, the longer mission time coverage will increase our dataset, making it even more valuable to the SSA community.
