ADAPTIVE OPTICS FOR SATELLITE IMAGING AND EARTH BASED SPACE DEBRIS MANOEUVRES Doris Grosse(1,2), Francis Bennet(1,2), Michael Copeland(1,2),Celine´ d’Orgeville(1,2), Franc¸ois Rigaut(1,2), and Ian Price(1) (1)Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2611, Australia, Email:
[email protected] (2)SERC Limited, Mount Stromlo, Weston Creek, Australia ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION Space Debris is becoming a more and more urgent issue As hundreds of thousands of space debris objects are ac- and action needs to be taken to both actively reduce the cumulating and the risk of collisions in space as predicted amount of debris in space, and prevent space debris ac- by Kessler [8] increases, more attention and efforts need cumulation caused by collisions of existing debris. To to be brought to Space Situational Awareness. It is the investigate and mitigate the risk of collisions of space de- aim of the Space Environment Research Centre (SERC) bris and satellites, a Cooperative Research Centre man- to create a more detailed data catalogue of satellites and aged by the Space Environment Research Centre (SERC) space debris in order to calculate, determine and predict has been established in Australia supported by the Aus- their positions more accurately, so that functional satel- tralian government and national and international part- lites can manoeuvre more efficiently around the debris. ners. The aim of the project is to improve orbital track- As those satellite manoeuvres are costly and shorten the ing and predictions and build an instrument to demon- life of satellites, SERC is also developing measures to strate remote manoeuvre by means of photon pressure prevent collisions by means of remote Earth based space and to perform high resolution Adaptive Optics (AO) im- debris manoeuvres by moving the debris object and not agery.