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arXiv · 2611.04610

Efficient Identification and Analysis of Space debris Trails in Time-Domain Astronomy

Sarvesh Kumar Yadav·Bhavya Ailawadhi·Talat Akhunov·Naveen Dukiya·Sara Filali·Paul Hickson·Priyanshi Kumari·Gokul Singh Mehra·Kuntal Misra·Vibhore Negi·Kumar Pranshu·Jean Surdej·Monalisa Dubey
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Abstract

This paper presents an automated end-to-end pipeline to detect and characterize artificial satellites and space debris streaks. As the exponential rise of orbital debris poses an escalating risk to global space assets, providing scalable, real-time tools is a critical contribution to the global Space Situational Awareness (SSA) network. The architecture utilizes a multi-stage geometric approach for raw image segmentation and high-precision morphological characterization. Experimental results demonstrate robust performance in real-world survey environments, successfully recovering streak profiles with an operational detection limit for features with integrated $SNR \ge 86$ and lengths $\ge 98$ arcseconds. This unsupervised framework strengthens global space sustainability efforts by monitoring RSO populations.

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Sarvesh Kumar Yadav, Bhavya Ailawadhi, Talat Akhunov, Naveen Dukiya, Sara Filali, Paul Hickson, Priyanshi Kumari, Gokul Singh Mehra, Kuntal Misra, Vibhore Negi, Kumar Pranshu, Jean Surdej, Monalisa Dubey. 2026-11-03. Efficient Identification and Analysis of Space debris Trails in Time-Domain Astronomy. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04610

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