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| Natura: | Preprint |
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2026
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| Accesso online: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27516 |
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| author | Blake, James A. Cooke, Benjamin F. Paragini, Cristina Feline, William Onken, Christopher A. Pollacco, Don Privett, Grant Yanagisawa, Toshifumi Airey, Robert Apergis, Ioannis Armellin, Roberto Beesley, Lily Chote, Paul Cutolo, Anna-Maria Eves, Stuart Fujiwara, Tomoko Kuroda, Daisuke Lockley, Isobel S. MacManus, Alexander McCormac, James Mitchell, Morgan A Nimura, Tokuhiro Nishiyama, Kota Okumura, Shin-Ichiro Schildknecht, Thomas Shrive, Billy Urakawa, Seitaro Veras, Dimitri Whitlock, Phineas Wolf, Christian |
| author_facet | Blake, James A. Cooke, Benjamin F. Paragini, Cristina Feline, William Onken, Christopher A. Pollacco, Don Privett, Grant Yanagisawa, Toshifumi Airey, Robert Apergis, Ioannis Armellin, Roberto Beesley, Lily Chote, Paul Cutolo, Anna-Maria Eves, Stuart Fujiwara, Tomoko Kuroda, Daisuke Lockley, Isobel S. MacManus, Alexander McCormac, James Mitchell, Morgan A Nimura, Tokuhiro Nishiyama, Kota Okumura, Shin-Ichiro Schildknecht, Thomas Shrive, Billy Urakawa, Seitaro Veras, Dimitri Whitlock, Phineas Wolf, Christian |
| contents | The geosynchronous (GSO) debris environment is continually evolving. Regular monitoring of the region is consequently of great importance, though the trade-off between coverage and sensitivity makes this challenging for the population of optically faint debris, where collecting area becomes a pivotal factor. Surveys conducted with large-aperture telescopes have provided crucial insights into the nature of this largely uncharacterised population. In this paper, we revisit a survey conducted with the 2.54 m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), presenting an overhaul of the astrometric calibration and object detection stages of the original analysis pipeline. We apply a blind stacking technique to boost target recovery, unearthing 25 tracklets previously missed by single-frame extraction methods, and pushing the sensitivity limit fainter by 1 magnitude. The same algorithm is applied to a contemporaneous dataset, captured with a 36 cm astrograph, enabling performance benchmarking through the attempted recovery of INT detections from commercial-off-the-shelf observations. We achieve sub-arcsecond astrometric accuracy through a combination of improved star trail centroiding and iterative distortion fitting, allowing short arc initial orbit solutions to be obtained. High-cadence light curves extracted for trailing detections indicate that faint fragments are proportionally more variable than bright derelicts, with many exhibiting photometric signatures of rapid tumbling, often straddling the image noise floor. Lastly, we present preliminary findings from a follow-up multi-national observation campaign, utilising telescopes in Australia, Japan and La Palma. As space traffic management concerns begin to extend beyond GSO altitudes, scientifically-driven surveys of high-altitude orbits have an important role to play in characterising the faint debris environment. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_27516 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | DebrisWatch II: Digging deeper for geosynchronous debris Blake, James A. Cooke, Benjamin F. Paragini, Cristina Feline, William Onken, Christopher A. Pollacco, Don Privett, Grant Yanagisawa, Toshifumi Airey, Robert Apergis, Ioannis Armellin, Roberto Beesley, Lily Chote, Paul Cutolo, Anna-Maria Eves, Stuart Fujiwara, Tomoko Kuroda, Daisuke Lockley, Isobel S. MacManus, Alexander McCormac, James Mitchell, Morgan A Nimura, Tokuhiro Nishiyama, Kota Okumura, Shin-Ichiro Schildknecht, Thomas Shrive, Billy Urakawa, Seitaro Veras, Dimitri Whitlock, Phineas Wolf, Christian Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Earth and Planetary Astrophysics The geosynchronous (GSO) debris environment is continually evolving. Regular monitoring of the region is consequently of great importance, though the trade-off between coverage and sensitivity makes this challenging for the population of optically faint debris, where collecting area becomes a pivotal factor. Surveys conducted with large-aperture telescopes have provided crucial insights into the nature of this largely uncharacterised population. In this paper, we revisit a survey conducted with the 2.54 m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), presenting an overhaul of the astrometric calibration and object detection stages of the original analysis pipeline. We apply a blind stacking technique to boost target recovery, unearthing 25 tracklets previously missed by single-frame extraction methods, and pushing the sensitivity limit fainter by 1 magnitude. The same algorithm is applied to a contemporaneous dataset, captured with a 36 cm astrograph, enabling performance benchmarking through the attempted recovery of INT detections from commercial-off-the-shelf observations. We achieve sub-arcsecond astrometric accuracy through a combination of improved star trail centroiding and iterative distortion fitting, allowing short arc initial orbit solutions to be obtained. High-cadence light curves extracted for trailing detections indicate that faint fragments are proportionally more variable than bright derelicts, with many exhibiting photometric signatures of rapid tumbling, often straddling the image noise floor. Lastly, we present preliminary findings from a follow-up multi-national observation campaign, utilising telescopes in Australia, Japan and La Palma. As space traffic management concerns begin to extend beyond GSO altitudes, scientifically-driven surveys of high-altitude orbits have an important role to play in characterising the faint debris environment. |
| title | DebrisWatch II: Digging deeper for geosynchronous debris |
| topic | Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Earth and Planetary Astrophysics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27516 |