Phoenix Telescope at AMOS: return of the Baker-Nunn camera

The number of objects orbiting the Earth has been increasing dramatically since the launch of Sputnik in the late 1950's. Thousands of orbiting objects, active satellites or debris, need to be tracked to ensure the accuracy of their orbital elements. To meet the growing needs for space surveillance and orbital debris tracking, the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site (AMOS) on Maui, Hawaii is bringing back one of the original Baker-Nunn cameras as the Phoenix Telescope to contribute to these efforts. The Phoenix Telescope retains the wide-field attribute of the original system, while the addition of enhanced optics allows the use of a 4k × 4k pixels back-illuminated CCD array as the imaging camera to provide a field-of-view of 6.8 degrees square (9.6 degrees diagonal). An integrated software suite automates the majority of the operational functions, and allows the system to process in-frame multiple-object acquisitions. The wide-field capability of the Phoenix Telescope is not only an effective tool in the space surveillance effort, but it also has a very high potential value for efforts in searching for and tracking Near-Earth objects (NEO). The large sky coverage provided by the Phoenix Telescope also has the potential to be used in searching for supernova and other astronomical phenomena. An overview of the Phoenix system and results obtained since first-light are presented.