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.
Famous quotes containing the words space and/or telescope:
“The within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and the heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)