Showing papers by "Neil Gordon published in 2011"

An Update on SSA in Australia

Abstract: At AMOS 2008 the first author presented a review of surveillance of space activities in Australia up to that date: this paper reviews significant initiatives and events that have taken place since then In summary some major policy commitments to Space Situational Awareness (SSA) have been made and some sizeable new R&D programs have been launched to develop nascent Australian SSA capabilities Australia has still to settle on its national requirements for SSA and space generally, however, so these initiatives have yet to evolve into substantial, enduring programs of record In more detail, the communiques issued at the annual Australian-US ministerial consultations in November 2010 announced an in-principle commitment to Defence collaboration on SSA and to establishing a joint space tracking facility in Western Australia: Defence in Australia is now working through setting up this facility and how it will move into SSA generally These are part of a larger national re-engagement with space: in particular in 2009 Australia committed to developing a national space policy and allocated A$40 million of funding to a new Australian Space Research Program (ASRP) to boost space research Over $5 million from this program has been awarded to projects centred on SSA, primarily to enhance EOS’ satellite laser tracking system In addition to these projects, the partners in an allied Defence R&D agreement that includes DSTO have agreed to a joint experiment that will fly a small formation of suitably instrumented CubeSats with the aim of, inter alia, providing ground truth for testing SSA capabilities More generally DSTO has been supporting various aspects of Defence’s engagement with SSA, including identification of S&T in which Australia has particular expertise that could be deployed on SSA given the necessary direction The paper outlines these recent developments, reviews relevant Australian expertise in one particular field, tracking and sensor fusion (the second author leads DSTO’s research program in this area), and canvasses some possible future programs and relationships

An adaptive coded aperture imager: building, testing and trialing a super-resolving terrestrial demonstrator

Abstract: There is an increasingly important requirement for day and night, wide field of view imaging and tracking for both imaging and sensing applications. Applications include military, security and remote sensing. We describe the development of a proof of concept demonstrator of an adaptive coded-aperture imager operating in the mid-wave infrared to address these requirements. This consists of a coded-aperture mask, a set of optics and a 4k x 4k focal plane array (FPA). This system can produce images with a resolution better than that achieved by the detector pixel itself (i.e. superresolution) by combining multiple frames of data recorded with different coded-aperture mask patterns. This superresolution capability has been demonstrated both in the laboratory and in imaging of real-world scenes, the highest resolution achieved being ½ the FPA pixel pitch. The resolution for this configuration is currently limited by vibration and theoretically ¼ pixel pitch should be possible. Comparisons have been made between conventional and ACAI solutions to these requirements and show significant advantages in size, weight and cost for the ACAI approach.