Chile is now home to an optical telescope for global satellite tracking coverage. It’s been installed and activated by Neuraspace, a leading name in space traffic management (STM).
This is the company’s second optical telescope (the first one was installed at the Beja air base in Portugal); it aims to expand satellite tracking coverage over the southern hemisphere. This combined satellite tracking capability enables coverage over both hemispheres through Neuraspace’s own telescopes, in addition to data from partner networks.
So why this part of Chile? This is a region with a high number of clear nights per year; thus the telescope in Chile is expected to be even more productive than the one in Beja, which has already produced more than 300,000 measurements of space objects in orbits from LEO to GEO within the first three months of operations.
Capable of acquiring more than one image per second for low orbits and tracking objects as small as 10 centimetres in diameter, Neuraspace says its telescopes rank among the world’s most advanced for astrometric and photometric data acquisition in low Earth orbit (LEO).
Both telescopes also support agile horizon-to-horizon multi-orbit tracking, allowing rapid target switching. They produce measurements ranging from a few seconds to tens of minutes, enabling scalable data acquisition for multiple purposes such as collision avoidance, debris tracking, pattern-of-life analysis, and launch and early orbit phase (LEOP), among others.
This latest addition strengthens the satellite tracking and analysis capabilities of the Neuraspace Space Traffic Management Platform, which integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for advanced data analysis.
Through this platform the company already provides services such as conjunction monitoring and collision avoidance to over 400 satellites.
The objective of this investment, funded by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) with a total budget of EUR25 million (US$26.3 million), is to enhance the safety and sustainability of airspace by providing complementary services to all companies operating in space.
These telescopes are also part of the AI Fights Space Debris project, a consortium led by Neuraspace in collaboration with a number of academic and technical institutions.
It’s an area of satcoms that will no doubt grow in importance. Indeed, space debris was mentioned in these pages in August after the rocket carrying satellites for China’s own version of the Starlink satellite constellation and internet service accidentally broke apart in space, creating a debris field in Earth’s orbit.
