Application of the Optimal Maintenance and Survey Tasking (OMST) strategy at the Telescope Network SMARTnet

Abstract

As of February 2022, the catalogue of space objects in the geostationary regime consists of about 5000 objects. Although not all of them are visible from a single telescope station, it is not possible to observe all of them in a single night. Together with the search for new objects, the task of catalogue maintenance becomes challenging. With the telescope network SMARTnet, we test different strategies to optimise planning of observation times of the individual stations. One strategy is called Optimal Catalog Maintenance and Survey Tasking (OMST) and tries to achieve the maximum number of detections with the minimum amount of viewing directions in sum of all involved telescopes. The strategy may be applied to a single telescope as well as to a sensor network. In the latter case, an optimisation trade-off is made in terms of sensor availability, probability of detection including the local viewing conditions and sensor capabilities. SMARTnet’s telescope stations are located on the Southern hemisphere utilising winter nights during the observation period. The observation plan is calculated for each station at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and distributed to the telescope stations. Conditions permitting, each plan is executed as complete as possible. Afterwards, the observation tracklets are analysed. Using subsequent nights, the performance of single object trasking – also called classical tasking – and OMST tasking is evaluated. Evaluation criteria are the comparison between the predicted and actually successfully observed objects, the total number of successfully observed objects and the rate between already catalogued objects, for which the tasking was run and previously uncatalogued objects.