Five Years of SMARTnet: Data, Processing, and Improvements.

SMARTnet, operated by the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern (AIUB) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), went online and became open to the public in 2017 with two telescope stations located in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, and Sutherland, South Africa. Over its five-year operational timespan, new Partners have joined while one Partner left, leaving telescope stations distributed today over Australia, South Africa, and Europe. All stations combined, 10 passive-optical telescopes are actively providing data to the network.
New contributors are currently in the applicant phase and will, together with further stations planned by DLR, enhance the network’s capabilities. The retrieved data are used for research, collision warnings, catalogue maintenance, or for deriving data products, which can be sold to third parties. For the aforementioned points, the Backbone Catalogue of Relational Debris Information (BACARDI) was developed at DLR. BACARDI processes input data received from SMARTnet to data products such as ephemerides or orbit information for telescope observation planning, and attempts to detect new objects where an association of observations to already known objects is unsuccessful. To better operate the telescope stations, a dedicated software, called SMARTies, is under development as a joint project by AIUB and DLR. With this software, the telescope stations operations can be optimised to increase the daily data acquisition. It is planned to release SMARTies as Open Source software.
To avoid deteriorating accuracy of the orbital information, ephemerides forecasted by BACARDI are combined with the planning tool “Optimal Catalog Maintenance and Survey Tasking” (OMST), which will help to keep all resident space objects in the data base. Furthermore, OMST will allow to search for new objects in the vicinity of the telescopes’ fields of view in so-called “dead-times”.