DARPA Space Surveillance Telescope скачать в хорошем качестве

DARPA Space Surveillance Telescope

Full story: http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Relea... As satellites become more common, they face growing risk of colliding with space debris and even each other. The U.S. Department of Defense has thus made space situational awareness a top priority to maintain communication, Earth observation and other critical capabilities upon which military, civilian and commercial functions rely. Traditional telescope technology, however, has difficulty finding and tracking small objects—such as debris and satellites—across wide tracks of sky, especially at the increasingly crowded geosynchronous orbits roughly 22,000 miles above the Earth's surface. To help overcome these challenges, DARPA has developed the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST). Through its unique combination of several novel technologies, the SST program seeks to enable much faster discovery and tracking of previously unseen, hard-to-find small objects in geosynchronous orbits. The SST offers unprecedented rapid search of small objects in space thanks to its innovative Mersenne-Schmidt design and its curved charge coupled device (CCD) imaging technology, the first of its kind. The combination also enables the SST to be much more compact than traditional ground-based telescopes of similar capability. The telescope's mount uses advanced servo-control technology, making the SST one of the quickest and most agile telescopes of its size ever built. The SST's capabilities are equally impressive: It can search an area larger than the continental United States or Australia in seconds and survey the entire geosynchronous belt within its field of view multiple times in one night, an order of magnitude faster than traditional telescopes. Additionally, the SST is ten times more sensitive than current state-of-the-art systems, enabling it to find and track much smaller, dimmer and more transient objects than its predecessors can. The SST will soon move from its current mountaintop location in New Mexico, where the system underwent operational testing and evaluation, to Australia, where it will provide key space situational awareness from the southern hemisphere—an area of the geosynchronous belt that is still largely unexplored.