Requirements on active (laser) tracking and imaging from a technology perspective

In the Science and Technology (S&T) community we frequently pursue technologies that are perhaps not mature enough for operational transition in a number of areas. The area of active tracking and active characterization of space objects is one of those areas. In this paper, we will lay out the requirements on such tracking and imaging systems from a pure technology perspective, including top level scenario-driven requirements and tracing down to camera-level requirements. That is, we will consider the various components of the tracking and imaging mission only from a performance standpoint and use that to derive some performance limitations on the system. The operational community will then have to decide whether such requirements are permissible in view of other constraints such as system cost.