GPU-accelerated Faint Streak Detection for Uncued Surveillance of LEO

摘要

By astronomical standards, small objects (<10cm) in LEO illuminated by the Sun under terminator conditions are quite bright, depositing 100's to 1000's of photons per second into small telescope apertures (< 1m diameter). The challenge in discovering these objects with no a priori knowledge of their orbit (i.e. uncued surveillance) is that their relative motion with respect to a ground-based telescope makes them appear to have large angular rates of motion, up to and exceeding 1 degree per second. Thus in even a short exposure, the signal from the object is smeared out in a streak with low signal-to-noise per pixel.