The use of streak observations to detect space debris

Man-made space debris orbit around the Earth at many altitudes in different orbits and many launches add further debris to already congested orbits. The European Space Agency (ESA) GSTP-funded Optical IN-SITU Monitor project started in 2016 and aims to analyse the end-to-end processing pipeline from image acquisition to the extracted positions of space debris. A camera will take images and an on-board data processor will filter and compress the images obtained, which – in case of a future flight model of the instrument – shall be downlinked to the ground station. For the image filtering and compression, several data reduction algorithms are considered and also two different kinds of processors are considered. The difficulty of the images is to differentiate between stars in the background (which have to be filtered out) and the debris. A short overview of the project is presented in this paper: its current status, the hardware choices and the data reduction algorithm trade-off.