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MAE Seminar: Conor Benson
November 22 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Title:
Event Cameras for Space Situational Awareness
Abstract:
Unlike traditional exposure-based cameras, event cameras react to relative changes in brightness. Event camera pixels operate independently, triggering brightness change events whenever they occur. So instead of generating images at a steady cadence, event cameras react to changes in the scene, outputting a stream of events with microsecond precision. Given this architecture, event cameras can detect rapid spatial and temporal brightness changes. This makes them promising for detecting, tracking, and characterizing space objects. In this seminar, I explore the potential utility of event cameras for these space situational awareness (SSA) applications. I present event camera dynamical models based on stochastic ODEs to better understand how events depend on the brightness, velocity, and other characteristics of dim, non-resolved space objects. I compare modeling results against real event camera data collected at our on-campus observatory. I present and analyze observations of the International Space Station, NASA’s recently launched ACS3 solar sail mission, and other active and retired spacecraft.
Bio:
Conor Benson is a Research Associate in the Vision, Autonomy, and Decision Research (VADeR) Lab in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2015 and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021. Conor’s research interests include the attitude dynamics of natural and artificial small bodies, estimation, and multi-phenomenology characterization of space objects.