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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.
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