A New Debris Detection Algorithm for Orbiting Solar Telescopes

As part of the Phase-A feasibility study for a new Solar Mission, ADAHELI, financed by the Italian Space Agency, an algorithm for detecting debris using images produced by the on-board solar telescope, has been developed. ESA's GSTP-5 ELEMENT 3 provisions, for activities related to Space Situational Awareness, identify optical systems as key elements for monitoring orbiting objects. So far, only ground based telescopes, such as VLT, have been considered as elements of a debris-monitoring capability. ESA's GSTP-5 also recommends to develop processing algorithms and performance model for space based imaging telescopes for object survey, tracking and imaging. In this paper, we show how an orbiting telescope may be used for debris-detection. Algorithm effectiveness in trail detection relies on the innovative characteristics of the ADAHELI solar telescope and its focal plane instrumental suite, allowing rapid image sequencing, as fast as 0.7s per image. The algorithm has been validated for simulated trails on sequences of real solar images at 1024x1024 pixels. One set at low resolution (1.9 arcsec/pixel) and one set at high resolution (0.1 arcsec/pixel) has been considered in order to determine the minimum detectable lengt