Simultaneous Multi-Color Photometric Observations of Tumbling GLONASS Satellites.

Schildknecht, Thomas; Brönnimann, A.; Vananti, A.; Rodriguez, J. (2023). Simultaneous Multi-Color Photometric Observations of Tumbling GLONASS Satellites. In: Proceedings of 2nd International Orbital Debris Conference (IOC). Sugar Land, Texas.

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The population of space debris increased drastically during the last years. Collisions involving massive
objects may produce large number of fragments leading to significantly growth of the space debris
population. An effective remediation measure in order to stabilize the population in LEO is therefore the
active removal of large, massive space debris. In order to design missions to remove such objects, detailed
information about their attitude states is required. One important property of an object targeted for
removal is its spin period and spin axis orientation in a body-fixed frame. The same holds for missions
intended to service uncontrolled spacecraft.
Non-resolving optical observations of the magnitude variations, so-called light curves, are a promising
technique to determine rotation or tumbling rates and the orientations of the actual rotation axis of
objects, as well as their temporal changes. Acquiring such observations as well as extracting attitude states
from these measurements is challenging and requires sophisticated observations and processing
techniques.
Over the past years, photometric observations of more than 60 decommissioned GLONASS satellites were
acquired at the Swiss Optical Ground Station and Geodynamics Observatory Zimmerwald, Switzerland.
The tumbling rates derived from these measurements show complex behaviour over time. Determining
the spin axis orientation in the body fixed and inertial frame turned out to be difficult without additional
information. Simultaneous multi-colour observations performed with the Zimmerwald twin wide-field
instrument ZimTWIN contain very promising complementary information. The paper will review the
temporal evolution of the spin rates and will particularly focus on the new type of colour observations.

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