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OWL-Net OPTICAL WIDE FIELD PATROL NETWORK


The OWL-Net is an optical space surveillance network composed of five robotic observatories located in Mongolia, Morocco, Israel, United States, and South Korea, respectively. Its main objectives are to observe Korean domestic low-earth-orbit satellites and space debris and to monitor the geostationary-earth-orbit belt over the Korean peninsula. Each site is equipped with a 0.5m aperture telescope, a high-speed mount, a fully-open type dome, an enclosure, a robust environment monitoring system, and an automatic operation system. Through international cooperation the OWL-Net is also conducting observations for celestial bodies such as asteroids and exoplanets.

 

                                                        


Telescope & Detector


OWL-Net is a network of five identical 0.5 m wide-field telescopes equipped with 4K×4K CCDs which provide one square degrees field of views with 0.98 arcsec/pixel plate scale.

Parameter

Value/Type

Mirror aperture

0.5 m

Optics type

Richey-Chretien

Field of View

1.1 deg x 1.1 deg

Plate Scale

0.98 arcsec/pixel

Mount type

Alt-Az

Mount speed

10 deg/sec

Mount acceleration

2 deg/sec2

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Target & Observation


The primary objective of OWL-Net is to track Korean domestic low Earth orbit satellites and monitor Korean GEO satellites. The OWL-Net detector is composed of a CCD camera, a filter wheel, a chopper and a time tagger. The chopper is used to cut the trail of a moving object such as low Earth orbit satellite on the image into multiple streaks. It has 4 rotating blades which intersect the light rays from the target into the CCD with a speed of 1 – 50 Hz.

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Orbit estimation performance


CRYOSAT-2 data shows the position difference between the orbital solutions from the observed data and the original TLE data of CRYOSAT-2. The difference in the cross-track and radial direction is less than 500 m. The difference in the in-track direction is larger compared to both directions, but it is still in the range of 1.5 km.


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KITSAT-1

KITSAT-1 is Korea's first artificial satellite and was launched on August 15, 1992. It is a microscopic satellite with a weight of 48.5 kg and a size of 35.2 × 35.6 × 67cm. Although no longer in operation after the end of 2004, it was successfully photographed at the OWL-Net USA station (Lemon Mountain, Arizona, USA) on June 29, 2019, at 13:58 KST. The distance from the observation point to KITSAT-1 was 1,997 km.

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