My research project takes place within the context of Space Domain Awareness (SDA), that is, monitoring Resident Space Objects (RSO) in Earth orbit using both ground-based and spaceborne sensors to continuously update and predict their trajectories in order to prevent potential collisions between each other.

In particular, I’m studying optical sensors for astrometry and orbit determination of RSOs. Optical sensors include both traditional frame-based cameras, which capture absolute luminosity in frames of pixels, and the more recent event-based cameras, also known as neuromorphic vision sensors, where pixels asynchronously capture only changes in brightness with microsecond level resolution in time, making them more efficient in terms of power consumption, latency, and data sparseness, even though the data processing is more challenging.

Astrometry is the measurement of the angular position of objects onto the celestial sphere. Such measurements can be input to an orbit determination algorithm to estimate the state of the sought target at a certain epoch and propagate it over time to retrieve the state at another epoch, for instance at the time of closest approach (TCA) with another RSO, so that a collision risk analysis can be performed.

The research is mainly focused on terrestrial sensing systems, but potential spaceborne applications are also taken into account.