Early CAL/VAL Process for an Optical Tracking System by Korea

An optical satellite tracking system has been developed and deployed by Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute since 2010. The objectives of the system consist of acquiring ephemerides of domestic low Earth orbit satellites, monitoring domestic geosynchronous Earth orbit satellites and investigating the behavior of space debris. This system employs in-house software for image processing and operating system. Most of mount, observatory enclosure and control system was designed and manufactured domestically. A commercial 4k CCD camera was adopted for the back-end image sensor. And the broken satellite streak is generated by a chopper system in front of the CCD camera. The first observatory was built in Mongolia in September 2014. For the early calibration and validation phase, astrometric data of several bright low Earth orbit satellites has been collected from two observation sites in 2014. The preliminary results show the performance of system is close to the design specification.