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Portuguese Sst Capability PORTUGUESE SST CAPABILITY- THE PORTUGUESE SPACE SURVEILLANCE NETWORK SYSTEM José Freitas(1), João Fidalgo Neves(2), Raúl Domínguez-Gonzalez(3), Jaime Nomen(3), Miguel Santos(4), Margarida Vieira(4), Nuno Ávila Martins(4), and Noelia Sanchez Ortiz(3) (1)PT MoD-Armament Directorate, Avenida Ilha da Madeira, no1 4oPiso, 1400-204 Lisboa, Portugal, Email: [email protected] (2)Portuguese Navy Research Centre, Escola Naval, Base Naval de Lisboa, Alfeite, 2810-001 Almada, Portugal, Email: [email protected] (3)Deimos Space, Ronda de Poniente 19, 28760, Tres Cantos, Madrid, 28760, Spain, Email: {raul.dominguez, jaime.nomen}@deimos-space.com (4)Deimos Engenharia, S.A., Av. D. Joao II , No.41, 10th floor 1998-023 Lisboa, Portugal, Email: {miguel.santos, margarida.vieira, nuno.avila}@deimos.com.pt ABSTRACT The 2000 active satellites, which represent an enormous of the value by its operational output and by the growing investment they represent, are becoming threatened by the growing number of active constellations, most of them the “new space” actors. This represents a growing need to predict and correct the orbits of the active satellites, avoiding collisions with other inactive satellites or debris, and guarantee their long-term operation and investment. In such sense, Portugal, through the Portuguese Ministry of Defense – Armaments Directorate, is investing with the purpose of obtaining SST data autonomously, as well as to produce derived SST information and services from it. Such information will contribute to a wider national and international common effort, with valuable data and services that can support all kind of stakeholders. This paper describes the capabilities and versatility of the Portuguese SST network, provides information about the main assets, their capabilities and characteristics and provides samples and discussions on the data products obtained and made available by the National Operations Centre (NOC). Keywords: SSA; SST; Surveillance; Tracking; Conjunction; Cataloguing; Visualization; NEO; Re-entry. 1. INTRODUCTION sensors are mainly devoted to surveillance activities, Notwithstanding the different approaches and inherent whereas the other two are devoted for tracking comprehension of the Space Situational Awareness activities. In order to even extend the observation (SSA) concept, the common European concept defined capability, one of the sensors has been conceived and in [1] is a holistic approach towards the main space designed in a deployable configuration that will allow a hazards, encompassing collision between satellites and different placement in the future, according to the space debris, space weather phenomena, and near national and international framework needs. The earth objects. “Space Hazards” are in the frame of the measurement accuracy of these optical sensors is better Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) program, created than 1 arcsec and the NOC includes a complete SST suite, by means of [2], which represents a growing interest in including the tasking of sensors, an autonomous SST Europe to improve autonomy and to obtain and exploit catalogue, conjunction screening and evaluation, re- space situational awareness data (more specifically, SST entry analysis, fragmentation detection and data). In order to keep the pace of the western nations visualization capabilities. Cataloguing function includes and contribute to such common effort, Portugal has set initial orbit determination, routine orbit determination up an initial network of four state-of-the space debris and correlation, and enables the autonomous built-up of optical sensors and a National Operations Centre (NOC). catalogue with no information from outside of the The optical sensors allow extremely high throughput of Portuguese network. The Conjunction screening allows Earth-orbiting object data, as well as solar system detecting the conjunctions of one or several objects of objects (NEOs). Their location is spread over the interest against the own and external catalogues, while Portuguese territories, namely mainland and overseas the evaluation implement 5 different algorithms, Re- territories (Azores and Madeira), separated by more entry prediction includes a long-term re-entry mode than 1.000kmt far from each other sites, which allows to based on long-term (up to 25 years) semi-analytical have, almost at all times, observation capability, no propagation, while short-term mode works by fitting matter the weather conditions. These locations are the orbital data, in order to find a re-entry trajectory in the western locations in the European mainland and extend coming days. Fragmentation detection is autonomous, far beyond it (by means of the Azores and Madeira and works by automatically detecting new fragments in territories), allowing to access some extreme GEO the autonomous catalogue and tracing them back to longitudes from European outermost territories. Two their origin. The connection to external entities and Proc. 8th European Conference on Space Debris (virtual), Darmstadt, Germany, 20–23 April 2021, published by the ESA Space Debris Office Ed. T. Flohrer, S. Lemmens & F. Schmitz, (http://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int, May 2021) databases allows it to work in a closed loop, in which Additional local support is available in the case of sensor tasking requests are generated from the events emergency. Local support is mandatory if there is a loss of interest, and the processing of generated data of remote access, plus a failure of safeguard automatic produces refined information for these events. Beyond mechanisms or bad weather. the SST functionalities, it includes NEO capabilities, by collaborating with the Minor Planet Center and 2.1 OPTICAL SITES evaluating possible long-term NEO impacts on Earth and 2.1.1 Madeira site its consequences. Space weather capability is performed The Madeira site (SOO) comprises two sensors (tracking by aggregating observational data provided by third and surveillance). They are controlled remotely from the parties. NOC, with processing servers located in a dedicated room near the domes (Figure 2). The characteristics of 2. THE PORTUGUESE SPACE SURVEILLANCE AND the two sensors are summarised in tables 1 and 2. TRACKING SYSTEM (SST-PT) At the actual date, SST-PT comprises four optical telescopes and a NOC, notwithstanding the continuous effort to expand its capability with other assets and functionalities. The telescopes have surveillance and tracking capabilities for Earth-orbiting objects and for NEO objects. They include: • One surveillance and one tracking telescope located at Pico do Arieiro, in Madeira Island (SOO, Site de Observacão Óptica). • One tracking sensor located in Santa Maria Figure 2. SOO domes island (Azores), at the RAEGE (Rede Atlântica de Estações Geodinâmicas e Espaciais) facility. 2.1.2 Santa Maria site • One surveillance sensor, currently in an interim The sensor based on Santa Maria Island is a tracking location at Terinov technological park (Terceira island, telescope located at the RAEGE facilities (Figure 3). As a Azores), but to be deployed to mainland – Pampilhosa tracking telescope, its characteristics are summarised in da Serra. table 2. The two surveillance sensors are identical, and so are the two tracking sensors and all can be operated remotely, from the NOC or from a nearby control room, which comprises the telescope hardware and the servers required to control them. Apart from the telescope control, the NOC is responsible for planning the observations every night, as well as building a catalogue from the own observations, evaluation of conjunctions, re-entries and exchange of data with other entities. Figure 1 shows the location of all these assets. Figure 3. Santa Maria telescope The sensor was calibrated on 19/01/2021. This calibration was performed by observing satellites of the Galileo constellation. Such satellites, as they are GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) publish ephemeris with centimetre precision, and therefore are a very suitable target for calibration. Table 3 summarises the results. Figure 1. Location of the SSTPT assets Optical design Schmidt Cassegrain Coma- Therefore, ideally, along-track errors should be centred Free in zero in order to have an unbiased system. In this case, (ACF) the accuracy shown here is in the range of milliseconds, Aperture 400 mm and sub-millisecond in two of four cases. Normally, optical sensors are considered biased when they show Focal length 3251 mm an average of 10 milliseconds over several tracks Focal relation (f/R) 8 (5.5 with focal reducer) (covering different targets and pass geometries). In the o FOV 21 x 21 arcmin (0.35 x case at hand, the Santa Maria sensor shows unbiased o 0.35 ) behaviour. Resolution 1.19 arcsec/pix CCD chip EMCCD 201 e2v Back- illuminated CCD array 1024 x 1024 Pixel size 13 x 13 microns Quantum efficiency 90% Colling temp -95◦C Table 1. Characteristics of tracking sensors Optical design Rowe-Ackermann-Schmidt Figure 4. Calibration results for Galileo 205 Aperture 356 mm Focal length 790 mm Focal relation (f/R) 2.2 Central obstruction 158 mm Well corrected circle 61.1 mm (4.4o) Wavelenght range 400 – 900 nm FOV 160 x 160 arcmin (2.67o x 2.67o) Resolution 2.35 arcsec/pix CCD chip GSense4040 (sCMOS) Figure 5. Calibration results for Galileo 218 CCD array 4096 x 4096 Pixel size 9 x 9 microns Quantum efficiency 74% Colling temp 40 ◦C below ambient Table 2. Characteristics of surveillance sensors Galileo ID COSPAR ID bias (milliseconds) 205 2015-045A -0.4 216 2017-079B -11 218 2017-079D 0.4 Figure 6. Calibration results for Galileo 216 222 2018-060B 5 Table 3. Santa Maria calibration summary The next figures (4, 5, 6 and 7) show the calibration results obtained with the CALMA1 tool at the NOC (see section 2.2.) Along-track errors are directly associated with time bias. As a reference: a system that does not correctly account for light time travel would show a bias of roughly the telescope/satellite distance divided by the speed of light. In these conditions, a Galileo satellite would show a bias of 77 to 98 milliseconds just for this Figure 7.
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