WASHINGTON — Portuguese space traffic management startup Neuraspace has installed a second optical telescope to help track low Earth orbit (LEO) objects across both hemispheres.
Neuraspace said Dec. 6 it had activated a telescope in Chile to scan the southern hemisphere for objects as small as 10 centimeters, three months after setting up a similar telescope at a Portuguese Air Force base in Beja, Portugal, in the northern hemisphere.
The European Commission funded the telescopes as part of Portugal’s 25 million euro ($26 million) Recovery and Resilience Plan. Deimos, which was recently sold to Spanish defense contractor Indra, supplied the telescopes.
Neuraspace plans to pool data from its own infrastructure with data gathered from public sources and partnerships with other ground telescope providers to improve space traffic management services for satellite operators.
The four-year-old venture’s software platform uses artificial intelligence to provide real-time satellite position information to improve operations in space, including collision avoidance maneuver guidance.
According to Neuraspace CEO Chiara Manfletti, the newly installed telescopes can capture data roughly every second, helping reduce positional error uncertainty to less than 100 meters during a single orbital revolution.
“Due to their locations, our measurement results would roughly double over the course of one year, addressing seasonal gaps associated with tracking LEO objects with passive optical systems,” Manfletti said via email.
“Thus, we will have more data that can be used to update orbits at least two times more frequently. And by tracking data with two telescopes, we can obtain orbits up to several times more accurately than by using only one sensor.”
She declined to disclose the exact location of the Chile telescope. Neuraspace’s first telescope has already produced more than 300,000 measurements of objects from LEO to geostationary orbit, and the company expects its second will be 25% more productive because of a higher number of clearer nights in the area.
“Because of better viewing conditions, Neuraspace will also be able to achieve slightly better accuracy, more detection and fainter objects,” Manfletti added.
More than 400 satellites currently use Neuraspace’s platform for conjunction monitoring and collision avoidance services, according to the company, which started offering a free version in March to foster more collaboration among operators.
