We introduce two new tools to the application of polarimetry to space domain awareness (SDA), the LoVIS spectropolarimeter on the 3.6 m AEOS telescope and deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Using a dataset of 20,000 simulated satellite observations, we train a CNN to map distance-invariant spectropolarimetric data to object identity. We report the classification accuracy of this simulation for a 9-class satellite problem, comparing results against low-resolution spectra for which prior success has been demonstrated as well as solar phase angle and satellite apparent magnitude. These initial experiments show potential for improved discrimination against nearly identical satellites on the basis of added polarimetric data.
Astronomical images collected by ground-based telescopes suffer from degradation and perturbations attributed to atmospheric turbulence. We investigate the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to ground-based satellite imaging to address two existing problems. First, the multiframe blind deconvolution (MFBD) algorithms that can extract well-resolved images from these degraded data frames are computationally expensive, requiring supercomputing infrastructure for relatively fast performance and currently cannot be done in real time. Because of this, it is difficult to optimize collection parameters to maximize the likelihood of producing a resolved image with MFBD. Second, the space-object National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale (SNIIRS) allows human analysts to provide a quantitative score of image quality based on identification of target features. It is naturally difficult to automate this scoring process, not only because the scale is based on identifiable features but also because the images may be in an almost-resolved image quality regime that is difficult to handle for traditional computer vision techniques. For both applications, we present our results using CNNs on data collected at the Maui Space Surveillance Site as well as a new synthetic dataset we introduce containing over a million SNIIRS rated pairings of perturbed and pristine ground-based satellite images.
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