UK and Australia join forces on deep space situational awareness

Air February 5, 2020

Dstl is teaming up with British and Australian astronomers to study deep space situational awareness by tracking satellites.

For the Argus 2 exercise, satellites orbiting more than 36,000km above the Earth will be tracked to study deep space situational awareness in the latest ‘citizen science’ project. The experiment is designed to explore affordable options for Space Situational Awareness, the process of tracking objects in orbit and predicting their future paths to help mitigate the risks to UK satellites posed by collisions with debris.

During Argus 1 in 2019 Dstl collaborated with the Basingstoke Astronomical Society (BAS) in the UK to track objects orbiting in the Low Earth orbit (LEO) belt 400km above the Earth. As part of Argus 2, members of the Tamworth Regional Astronomy Club (TRAC) in Australia will be observing the satellites from the Southern Hemisphere; this is to ensure that results are consistent with those captured by BAS from the Northern Hemisphere and to examine the benefits and challenges of processing observations from two sites.

Dstl: Official partner of DPRTE 2020.

Dstl’s Space Programme Manager Mike O’Callaghan said: “Space Situational Awareness is fundamental to protecting the operation and security of Space satellites. As Space becomes more crowded the likelihood of collisions increases.”

“By observing current satellites we can help predict how they may behave in future and design measures to avoid collision. The data gathered with BAS was extremely useful and we look forward to adding a new dimension with the Australians.”

As part of the project, the astronomers will also be observing redundant satellites which have reached the end of their operational life. The powerful, 8.5-tonne telescope with 24-inch aperture and f1 focal ratio was developed in the late 1950s to monitor the early generation of satellites.

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Australia Dstl Low Earth Orbit satellite operation satellites Space space junk