Goals of the CICLOPE station
The space domain is currently undergoing radical changes with the decrease of launching costs and the standardization of small platforms and components. Many news actors and projects have made the number of resident space objects (RSO) – and unfortunately debris – considerably grow in the last few years. Space is now essential for a number of services, and the potential –and sometimes confirmed – threats have grown accordingly. It is therefore of the utmost importance to maintain an updated catalog of RSO, including their origin, owner, goals, and trajectories to keep track of this continuously evolving population.
ONERA has defined and integrated the CICLOPE prototype station to develop and test new methods for the detection and tracking of RSOs in high altitude orbits, where the distance is too large for RADAR systems to operate at reasonable energetic cost. The priority is the domain with altitude between 2 000 and 36 000 km, called Medium Earth Orbit, where navigation satellites and some telecom satellites operate.
The main goal of CICLOPE is to detect RSOs and to measure their position and speed to maintain a catalog. Emphasis is put on the development of innovative and efficient yet affordable approaches to operate in difficult conditions (faint objects against strong background, with significant speed compared to the stars), to perform accurate measurements despite atmospheric disturbances (refraction, turbulence) and to optimize the scan pattern for maximum efficiency.
A secondary goal is to detect photometric features on some RSOs, in order to either recognize and follow them if they have a complex trajectory, either extract some physical parameters such as their size or orientation.
Hence its name: Cataloguing, Identification and Characterisation on Long-distance Orbits: Preliminary Experiment (in French: Catalogage, Identification et Caractérisation sur des Lointaines Orbites : Prototype Exploratoire).
Description
CICLOPE is now installed on the rooftop of Onera’s building in Salon-de-Provence. Nearly all its components are off the shelf, some of them (*) delivered and installed through a purchase from Astelco:
- A completely retractable enclosure (*), enabling a full-sky vision and simple fast tracking,
- A fast direct-drive equatorial mount (NTM-500 *),
- An optical tube (*) from Celestron with diameter 36 cm,
- A custom-built filter selector (*),
- A low-noise large format sCMOS camera with high frame-rate,
- A linux server with GPU boards to process the camera data,
- A Boldwood Sensor II weather station (*),
- A Miratlas ISM (Integrated Sky Monitor),
- A thermo-regulated proximity cabinet.
Operation is fully remote from the beginning and full automation is forthcoming.
CICLOPE was made possible thanks to the contribution of many entities in Onera: the Direction Scientifique Générale (which founded manpower within the Programme de Recherche Fédérateur SUSA – SUrveillance de SAtellites), the Direction des Programmes d’Investissement (which allowed the procurements and the infrastructure adaptation), the Direction des Achats, the DIrection de la COordination des centres (which interfaced CICLOPE to the buildings in Palaiseau and Salon-de-Provence), the Département Traitement de l’Information et Systèmes (which initiated and drives CICLOPE) and the Département d’Optique et Techniques Associées (both contributing to the development), the Direction des Systèmes d’Information and the Direction de la COMmunication. Thomas Delaite’s PhD was supported by PhD Grant DGA/AID 2021305.