Argus 3 – Imaging spacecraft in cislunar space – An Invitation

[Grant Privett]

Argus 3 – Observing spacecraft in cislunar space

The UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) is looking for volunteers from the BAA observer community to participate in a research project – “Argus 3” – aimed at assessing the effectiveness of consumer-level astronomical telescopes in maintaining accurate orbits for remote spacecraft and probes.

The hope is that participants would be willing to provide image series of remote satellites – such as the JWST, Spektr-R and others – that would augment datasets already being collected by Dstl.

A particular challenge would be to see how close to the Moon it is possible to track faint stars with a variety of astronomical equipment.

The information obtained will help inform future procurement discussions and minimise costs.

The activity follows-on from earlier Argus projects, which were reported at the NAM and AMOSTech conferences: a summary of the original Argus activity was published by Feline et al. in 2019: https://amostech.com/TechnicalPapers/2019/Space-Situational-Awareness/Feline.pdf.

The slide pack will be made available after the event as a pdf only.

On Sunday 19th October at 10:00 BST we will be holding a Microsoft Teams meeting for anyone interested in hearing about it or participating. The meeting will include a 45 minute brief followed by a question and answer section.

Please contact Grant Privett at gjprivett@dstl.gov.uk to receive an MS Teams invitation.

[Grant Privett]

I eventually beat MS Teams into submission and I’ve sent out invitations to all those who responded to my gjprivett@dstl.gov.uk email address.

Please note: I shall be reading my emails up until Saturday night, so anyone still wanting to join in, can contact me.

I will send the pdf out to those who expressed an interest, whether they attended or not as weekends seem pretty busy in most households. 🙂

See you all on Sunday morning.

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