RECONSO Satellite

Optical payload in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to enable low-cost unqueued space object detection and tracking.

Optical payload in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to enable low-cost unqueued space object detection and tracking.

Inertial bearing and apparent magnitude measurement will be processed on-board and downlinked to Georgia Tech for further processing and distribution. This data will directly support efforts to mitigate the threat of space debris to national and international space assets by supplementing existing Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors.

Photographs of the sky regions of interest will be acquired during the sunlight portion of the orbit. Onboard processing will occur during the eclipse periods. Image processing will detect moving objects in the acquired series of images and assign orbital parameters to the detected objects. Downlinked data will be the estimated orbital elements for the debris, not raw images.