Near-Earth Observations by Widely Separated Telescopes

Abstract

We suggest the idea of a total-sky survey at the International Space Station by four small wide-angle telescopes with polarization filters and charge-coupled device arrays separated several metres from one another. The video information processing will be carried out by a real-time multiprocessor system on board the station. This experiment would allow us to observe the sunlit space debris and meteoroids of centrimetre size with estimations of their distances and velocities at distances up to 20 km from the station and to investigate the interplanetary and interstellar medium by making polarization sky maps and detecting the weak-contrast features on them.