Space Debris — Optical Measurements
Jiri Silha
Space debris is a major threat to the satellite infrastructure. A collision with even small particle, e.g. 1 cm of size, can cause a catastrophic event when the parent body, spacecraft or upper stage, will break up into hundreds of trackable fragments. Space debris research helps to discover, monitor and characterize these objects, identify their origin and support their active removal. Surveys with optical telescopes aim to discover new objects for cataloguing and to increase the accuracy of space debris population models. The follow-up observations are performed to improve their orbits or to investigate their physical characteristics. We will present the space debris population, its orbital and physical characteristics and we will discuss the role which the optical telescopes play in space debris research. We will also discuss the adopted astronomical techniques like astrometry, photometry and spectroscopy used in the space debris domain.
Comments: 20 pages, 9 figures, Book chapter in “Reviews in Frontiers of Modern Astrophysics: From Space Debris to Cosmology” (eds Kabath, Jones and Skarka; publisher Springer Nature) funded by the European Union Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership grant “Per Aspera Ad Astra Simul” 2017-1-CZ01-KA203-035562
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-38509-5
Cite as: arXiv:2012.12549 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2012.12549v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Jiri Silha
[v1] Wed, 23 Dec 2020 09:21:33 UTC (6,903 KB)
