Tamara Payne, Applied Optimization Inc., Philip J. Castro, Applied Optimization Inc., Joseph W. Moody, Brigham Young University, Elizabeth A. Beecher, AFRL/RYWW, Matthew D. Fisher, NASIC/GSMS, Roberto I. Acosta, NASIC/GSMS
Keywords: spectral, characterization, SSA, photometry
Abstract:
Accurate calibrations are critical to the ability to extract reliable features from the photometry such as albedo-Area and for fusion of data taken with different sensors. The new large stellar calibration catalogs produced by astronomers can be leveraged to improve the photometric calibrations of Resident Space Objects (RSOs). These catalogs use the Sloan filter set. In order to utilize these new catalogs, we need to evaluate the satellite discrimination capability of this filter set. Past research has shown that photometry taken in the Johnson-Cousins filter set and specialized filter sets such as SILC makes it possible to classify geosynchronous satellites by their bus type and uniquely identify them. In this work, we collect photometric signatures on a selected set of geosynchronous satellites in both Sloan and Johnson. With these measurements we compute the color indices and use the Mahalanobis distance as a metric of discrimination. We perform a statistical analysis on the metric to quantify the discrimination capability of each filter set.
Date of Conference: September 20-23, 2016
Track: Non-Resolved Object Characterization