The project was awarded the funding “Fondecyt Regular”, and its looking forward to establish a space monitoring system, throught computational imaging.
COCTELS – «COmpressive Computational TErapixeL imaging for Space surveillance», is part of the projects we’ve awarded as The Optoelectronics Laboratory of PUCV’s Electrical Engineering School, by initiative of our director Dr. Esteban Vera.
This project, as we said, was awarded de Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (Fondecyt) Regular 1221883, with the funding of US $300K provided by the Chilean Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID). The investigation its going to last 4 years, starting in April, 2022 up until March, 2026.
¿What is it about?
COCTELS its about the huge problematic about surveillance of space junk. Currently there is a big amount of objects surrounding our orbit and that number its increasing each day, every time we send a new satelite we are leaving more elements in space that are very hard to observe from the Earth.
Once this satelites stop working they travel out of control and could possibly desintegrate, threatening other satelites that are still working and also endanger future space missions.
¿Whats the proposed solution?
The idea of this space surveillance investigation is to develop a new technology of scalable neuromorphic cameras to track moving space objects at a very high resolution, without precedent, at a TERAPIXEL level.
They will allow us to monitor and catalog even the tiniest objects that orbit our sky at all times, which is imposible with the current technology.
In this way, we would become pioneers in space awareness, taking advantage of the benefits of Chileans skies beyond mere astronomical observation.
