Satellite Monitoring, Change Detection, and Characterization Using Non- Resolved Electro-Optical Data From a Small Aperture Telescope

The Air Force Research Laboratory has been pursuing development of the exploitation of passive reflectance signatures collected from electro-optical sensors to obtain information on man-made satellites. Recent data collection campaigns have acquired filter photometric signatures in the visible regime from satellites in a variety of orbits and under a variety of operating conditions. The orbits include semi-synchronous, geosynchronous (geo), geosynchronous transfer, and supersynchronous. The operating conditions include active, inactive, stable, and unstable. These satellites pose unique challenges because many times they are too distant or too small or both to image using conventional means. Therefore, they are ideal candidates to use to develop techniques that exploit non-resolved photometric intensity measurements to determine status, detect changes, identify, and characterize. The data were collected using a Raven-type sensor system. The telescope has a 16-inch aperture and the optical path includes a filter wheel and a charged-coupled device (CCD). In this paper, we present the data collected from these recent campaigns, the exploitation techniques used, and the results of the analyses. The results will compare signatures from satellites in different orbit regimes under different operating conditions and illustrate the robustness of the techniques.