The first Italian-Russian observatory for space debris monitoring

The space debris are a danger for operative satellites and human missions. A large amount of debris is located in Low Earth Orbit and in Geostationary Orbit, and several institutes all around the world monitor the growth of the debris population. Since a few years GAUSS (Group of Astrodynamics of the University of Rome “La Sapienza†) has started carrying out space debris observation campaigns exploiting non dedicated facilities. Presently the GAUSS is manufacturing, in the framework of a contract with Italian Space Agency (ASI), the first Italian observatory completely dedicated to optical space debris detection. During the optical campaigns, a large amount of images is expected to be archived. This is the reason why a software is needed to carry out automatic images processing, to detect the debris and identify their nature. The paper deals with the algorithms applied to detect objects with relative motion with respect to the stars background. The frames can be taken in either sidereal tracking mode or when the astronomical telescope is fixed with respect to the Earth. In the paper the procedures to increase the signal to noise ratio and the solutions to detect moving objects and their number will be described. The algorithm is based upon close images comparison and it permits to remove stars and biases, avoiding morphological analysis in order to reduce calculation time. The last step is the object identification by comparison with the Two-Line Elements (TLE) catalogue. The actual position of the detected object is compared with the propagated positions of catalogued ones. In this way it’s possible to make fully autonomous the image processing and the objects identification procedures. Moreover a debris preliminary sizing is performed based upon the standard hypothesis worldwide used. Preliminary results, achieved by GAUSS, are shown and discussed in the paper.