Abstract A special method has been developed by us to allow the extraction of all observations of satellites and orbital debris objects (ODO's) from the IRAS database of 15 Gbytes. Although the data were obtained in 1983, the pertinent ODO's are still in orbit, because they are all located above 900 km. The method was applied to the IRAS database, and an infrared orbital debris database (ODD) resulted of 100 Mbytes. The ODD contains 200,000 entries, and is extremely complete, but unreliable. Special access and analysis software has been prepared as well that easily makes it possible to define a subsample of very reliable observations of orbital debris objects. Such a subsample will typically consist of several thousands of observations of maybe a few thousand ODO's. The analysis software allows to determine emissivities, distances and sizes of such ODO's down to 1 cm size. Therefore, thousands of orbital debris objects can be studied now in the infrared wavelength range.
Space debris observed by IRAS
Advances in Space Research ; 13 , 8 ; 49-57
01.01.1993
9 pages
Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
Centimetre-sized orbital debris observed with IRAS
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1993
|Detecting space debris above 900 km using IRAS
AIAA | 1990
|Analysis of IRAS data for orbital debris
Elsevier | 1987
|Analysis of IRAS data for orbital debris
NTRS | 1986
|IRAS: Space Technology from the Netherlands
NTIS | 1983
|