Hyper-Spectral Speckle Imaging for Space Situational Awareness

When observing targets in the near-Earth space environment using ground-based telescopes, the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere and the telescope’s aperture combine to act as a low-resolution spectrometer. The light at disparate wavelengths from a given point in the object lands at different spatial locations in the focal plane. Here we investigate the feasibility of capitalizing on this effect to provide snapshot hyper-spectral imaging of targets in the near-Earth space environment through ultra-broadband speckle imaging. In particular, we focus on the potential for using ultra-broadband speckle images for high-resolution, high-contrast imaging of closely spaced objects with a large contrast in brightness. It was found that this technique is capable of distinguishing closely spaced objects down to 0.14 arc-seconds and providing estimates on the spectra. The primary component of the closely spaced objects had very good recovery, while the secondary’s recovery was dependent on dependent on separation and contrast ratio.