Alan Scott (COM DEV International), Craig Haley (COM DEV International), Neil Rowlands (COM DEV International)
Keywords: SSA, Space-based Assets, Optical Systems, Small Telescope Systems, Instrumentation, Imaging
Abstract:
COM DEVs compact Sapphire optical payload is currently providing Space Situational Awareness in a dedicated low earth orbit mission to better than 16th visual magnitude. This LEO instrument is sufficient for imaging the vast majority of large GEO satellites, but misses a significant population of fainter uncatalogued deep space objects with median apparent brightness near 18th magnitude. Modern detector technology allows significant increases in sensitivity that will enable future Sapphire variants to catalogue this population within the same compact volume envelope. This enhanced SSA mission could provide a low cost revenue stream to a GEOsat operator with spare resources to act as a host. It could also operate as a dedicated microsatellite mission. Unfortunately, both options typically require costly attitude control system upgrades to provide the pointing stability necessary for deep SSA. We present a compact, high frame-rate hosted payload architecture that requires no optimization for host jitter or fine pointing drift, and assess its expected performance relative to the Sapphire optical payload.
Date of Conference: September 9-12, 2014
Track: Space Systems