Image Processing For Geo Detection

Abstract

The space debris issue concerns anyone who decides to approach the space both for research and economic purpose. In fact, they have become a serious problem for the operative satellites, and regardless of their size, which goes from few millimeters to tenth of meters, the space debris are a threat both for the present and the future of the space missions. Nowadays, more than 28000 of orbiting object are placed around the Earth making their detection and recognition a primary issue in the space safeguard. The space debris affect all the orbital regime: from Low Earth Orbit up to the Geostationary region at about 36000 km. The Sapienza Space Systems and Space Surveillance Laboratory has been working for years in the field of the orbiting objects optical observations, and it is approaching the geostationary region monitoring by means an innovative optical system. In this paper the setup and the configuration of this system will be presented and, moreover, the image processing software for the geostationary object detection and recognition will be shown.