Makoto Tagawa (Kyushu University), Toshifumi Yanagisawa (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Hirohisa Kurosaki (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Hiroshi Oda (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Toshiya Hanada (Kyushu University)
Keywords: low Earth orbit, follow-up observation
Abstract:
This paper proposes a simplified facility for a follow-up observation method. A tri-axis altazimuth mount instrument is required in the conventional observation facility to keep a target as a light spot during a visible pass. The tri-axis instrument enables the facility to observe the target with a high signal-to-noise-ratio. However, such instrument becomes costly due to its complexity. The proposed method uses a bi-axis altazimuth to guide a telescope into an observation target region. It should be noted that the bi-axis altazimth does not guide the telescope toward the target continuously therefore the target appears as streaks in images. Intensities in the streak are degraded in signal-to-noise-ratio in comparison to that in the light spot taken by a telescope on a tri-axis altazimuth because original intensity was divided into the pixels. The proposed method recovers such low signal-to-noise-ratio using 1) an image-processing algorithm and 2) multi-telescope. The image-processing algorithm developed for this study aims to detect an object appeared as faint streaks in images. The initial study also found that the algorithm requires primary orbit information of the target to complete detection calculation in reasonable time consumption. The algorithm can recovers signal-to-noise-ratio. However, it is still lower than that of continuous guiding observation result. The multi-telescope denotes an observation using two or more telescopes toward same region. We can improve signal-to-noise-ratio by summing images taken by the telescopes. We found that the image-processing algorithm improves signal-to-noise-ratio proportional to square root of streaks length. The multi-telescope observation method also improves signal-to-noise-ratio proportional to square root of number of the telescope. The proposed method combines the algorithm and the technique to recover degraded signal-to-noise-ratio. This paper discusses a feasibility of the proposed method and summarizes a mission scenario.
Date of Conference: September 9-12, 2014
Track: Poster