8th September 2026 14h00-14h30
Thijs Verhaeghe (CISS)
Space is becoming increasingly congested. In ESA’s latest space environment report, it is estimated that the total mass of all space objects in Earth orbit exceeds 16 600 tonnes, with catalogues tracking over 50 000 objects. In a society where space-based services have become essential for economic growth, social welfare and military applications, a sustainable space environment is vital. Precise Space Situational Awareness (SSA) is key to keeping space secure and accessible to future generations. In this paradigm, information is power. Current observation capabilities rely heavily on ground-based RADAR and optical measurements. Although very capable, these systems remain constrained by, e.g. geographical gaps and atmospheric interference. Space-based systems offer a unique solution to this problem, especially when existing secondary payloads can be repurposed with a tracking capability.
The ASTRA-Net framework offers a novel detect-before-track solution utilising star trackers. While the primary purpose of these optical payloads is to determine a spacecraft’s attitude to arcsecond precision, their ubiquity across satellite platforms makes them highly valuable secondary sensors. ASTRA-Net offers an integrated methodology to detect extremely low-SNR space objects using a U-Net CNN detector and a two-phase PLMB filter tracking architecture. The two-phased tracking design permits layer 1 to be implemented as an efficient edge-processing solution. Compressed tracking data packages are downlinked and fed into an unconstrained, computationally powerful and precise second layer. This approach strongly increases both the quality and the volume of data extracted from these optical payloads, creating a non-invasive and highly scalable SSA network.
This scalable capability directly addresses emerging strategic needs. In 2019, NATO declared space as an operational domain, shifting the focus from traditional sustainability to an all-encompassing Space Domain Awareness to protect allied assets. Within the Belgian Defence, the Space Security Centre is responsible for providing this service. Sovereign detection capabilities are of paramount importance to maintain a real-time space object catalogue. The developed methodology unlocks the latent observational capacity of existing spaceborne assets. It provides a robust pipeline for meticulously and confidently extracting high-precision orbital information from faint, low-SNR targets buried in background noise.