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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The PhD Defense for Timothy S. Murphy will happen at:
Time: Wednesday, March 28th, starting at 2:05 PM
Location: ESM 101
Title: "Integrated Tasking, Processing, and Orbit Determination for Optical Sensors in a Space Situational Awareness Framework"
Abstract: Space situational awareness (SSA) depends on having networks of telescopes taking large numbers of observations of myriad space objects to perform orbit estimation and object characterization. This involves many engineering problems, including choosing search patterns to look for objects, choosing telescope parameters to take the optical data, processing images to look for objects, and turning that information into orbit estimates. In the current state of the art, these technical problems are often treated as insular challenges, and are solved without regard to each other. This dissertation looks at telescope tasking, image processing, and statistical orbit estimation as a single complete problem. This work first analyzes the telescope tasking problem on advanced astrodynamic priors. Next, telescope tasking is analyzed with respect to specific image processing and detection methods. A specific estimation algorithm is used to optimize detection sensitivity. Finally, advanced astrodynamic priors are used to inform further detection methods. The contributions in this work find ways to leverage knowledge of the full SSA problem to make significant improvements on modeling and solving the individual problems. The end result is a more complete SSA system and data stream.
