Photometric Observation And Image Processing Of Space Debris

Space debris is the collection of space junk generated by human aerospace activities, which include rocket bodies, old satellites and so on. These de-funct objects distribute in the orbits at 200-36000km altitudes and move with speeds 7-8km/s. Once the collision between space debris and spacecraft occur, the kinetic energy is great enough to destroy the structure of space-craft and cause catastrophic accidents. With the development of utilization of space resources in peace, space launch activities have become more and more frequent, and the space debris environment is getting worse. Nowadays, space debris has become a global space environment pollution problem. Without effective measures, space debris will become the fundamental factor to restrict human aerospace activities and the utilization of space resources in the fore-seeable future.Optical observation of space debris in high earth orbits is one of the im-portant topics in recent years, which has good prospects in detection, tracking and recognition of space debris. Researchers all around the world have shown great interest in optical observation, and many institutions have joined in the research of optical observations. Space debris has no light of its own, but can reflect the light from the sun. The variability of luminosity and position(light curve and track) can be detected by photometric observations, which based on the optical telescope, and then realize the judgement of the geometric charac-teristics and motion state of space debris.Weihai Observatory of Shandong University is located in the most east of Shandong peninsula, equipped with a lm caliber reflector telescope. The quality of imaging is good and mechanical properties is excellent. Weihai Observatory of Shandong University can extend the observation network of space debris. This paper takes Weihai Observatory of Shandong University as a research platform. From the perspective of space debris detection demand, space debris photometric observations and data processing were systematically studied. What’s more, we developed a set of space debris data processing system using IDL language:SO-PhAst. The test of observation data shows that the system has good stability and accuracy, can greatly improve the efficiency of space debris data processing. In this paper, we observed MEO object 01361 and GEO object 28707. The photometry was performed with SO-PhAst and the light curves were got. The result shows that the variability of luminosity and position are closely related with the phase and structure of object.