The ESA Space Debris Telescope is located at the Teide Observatory on the island of Tenerife, Spain. The telescope is ESA's Optical Ground Station forming a part of the Artemis experiment. As a large part of the observation time is dedicated to space debris surveys, in particular the observation of space debris in the geostationary ring and in geostationary transfer orbits, the term ESA Space Debris Telescope became used very frequently. Space debris surveys are carried out every month, centered around New Moon.
The telescope is a Ritchey-Chrétien telescope with an aperture of 1 m and field of view of 0.7 degrees, equipped with a cryogenically cooled mosaic CCD-Camera of 4k*4k pixels. The detection threshold is between 19th and 21st magnitude, which corresponds to a capability to detect space debris objects as small as 15 cm in the geostationary ring.
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“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)
“The telescope at one end of his beat,
And at the other end the microscope....”
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