AGO70 Telescope, Slovak Optical System for Space Debris Research, Surveillance and SLR Tracking Support

The Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia (FMPI) operates its own Astronomical and Geophysical Observatory in Modra, Slovakia (AGO). AGO consists of several optical systems, some also developed by FMPI. One of those systems is a 70-cm Newtonian design telescope (AGO70) with primary focus on the space debris research and space surveillance and tracking (SST) to support the European attempts for autonomous SST operations. Slovak Republic is currently in the process of membership acceptance to the European Space Agency (ESA). A part of this process is the Plan for European Cooperating States (PECS) which is a program allowing the candidate countries to develop their capabilities to a competitive level before they fully join the ESA market. FMPI has been granted two consecutive ESA PECS projects so far to improve and develop missing functionalities at AGO70 to increase its data quality, data latency and overall efficiency. In our work we present the AGO70 system’s technical characteristics and observation programs. We introduce the overall design of the system and its functionalities. We will present the image processing pipeline which improves the obtained data’s quality and latency. The planning, acquisition and processing of light curves, BVRI photometric data, and astrometric measurements will be discussed in detail.