Phone

+61 8 6488 1135

Email

isc@uwa.edu.au

Space Situational Awareness

The Zadko Telescope team

The Zadko Observatory, or the ISC's Space Situational Awareness team, supports the operation of a suite of space surveillance detectors and maximises research and development via joint projects. The Observatory itself is hosted at the Gingin Gravity Precinct,  on the Swan Coastal Plain, 80km north of Perth and UWA’s campus. Established in 1998 with support of the Western Australian Government, the 4.7-hectare site is surrounded by natural woodland with high species diversity. The Observatory is home to the 1.0 metre f/4 fast-slew Zadko Telescope, the only metre-class research grade optical facility at this southern latitude.

Research

The Zadko Telescope is situated uniquely and strategically between the east coast of Australia and South Africa, which allows rapid imaging of optical transients at a longitude not monitored by other similar facilities. Since the Zadko Telescope has been in operation it has proven its worth by detecting numerous Gamma Ray Burst afterglows, two of these being the most distant ‘optical transients’ imaged by an Australian telescope.

Participation in large international research projects include the (1) Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO is jointly operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation for detection of gravitational wave candidate events and discovery), (2) NASA - Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) and solar system science, (3) European Space Agency (ESA) – Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) in conjunction with Parkes radio telescope; plus many more agencies.

Zadko Telescope
Zadko Telescope
Planetary Defence
 
The Zadko team team, as part of the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) uses The University of Western Australia’s Zadko Telescope to pursue a space situational awareness and space surveillance program involving numerous international partners. Space Situational Awareness refers to keeping track of objects in orbit and predicting where they will be at any given time.

The Zadko Observatory hosts:

  • two fully autonomous ground based optical stations for space surveillance and space traffic management for French based Ariane Group SAS.
  • one fully autonomous optical station used for Space Domain Awareness for USA based company Numerica contracted to the US Defence Department.
  • an autonomous, remotely-operated, alt-azimuth mounted PlaneWave Instruments CDK500 Telescope aligned with a ASA-300 optical instrument used for Space Situational Awareness contracted to the Polish Space agency (POLSA). This partnership with the Polish Space Agency has been recognised and supported by the Federal Government via an Australian Research Council Industry Linkage grant - Characterising satellites using un-resolved optical observations (LP210300698).
  • in collaboration with Curtin University, light curves from lunar impact flashes using the Zadko Telescope and a specialized camera with a frame rate of 400 frames per second will provide high temporal resolution light curves that require less external validation and provide new insights into the behaviour of lunar meteoroid impacts.
To complement the Zadko Telescope, the Australian Space Academy (ASA) have recently installed within the Zadko Observatory a Celestron 14” (C-14) telescope which will be dedicated to the near-Earth space environment, with particular emphasis on space situational awareness and planetary defence.

The Zadko Observatory team has installed three VHF antennas across northern Australia, used for the global space-based multiband astronomical Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) network. SVOM is a Chinese French space mission dedicated to the detection and study of gamma-ray bursts and their use for astrophysics and cosmology. Gamma-ray bursts are considered as the brightest and the most energetic events in the Universe since the Big Bang.

The observatory hosts an autonomous, remotely operated wide field of view optical telescope used for Space Domain Awareness (SDA) campaigns of Low Earth Orbit objects for the Space Debris team at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
 
They have also been approach to initiate an initial survey of nearby active galaxies, in particular those that host massive black holes in their centres, to determine which will be targets for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). The CTA is a multinational, worldwide project to build a new generation of ground-based gamma-ray instruments in the energy range extending from some tens of GeV to about 300 TeV.

It is also part of an international fully automated camera and radio network known as the ‘Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network’ (FRIPON), which is mostly focused on the study of the physical and dynamic properties of the smallest bodies (diameter ≤10 m) of interplanetary matter, such as interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), meteoroids, asteroids and comets which enter our atmosphere; the smaller particles are called meteors and the larger bodies are fireballs.
 
The site also hosts the Falcon Telescope - a joint initiative between the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), UWA and the Catholic Education Office of WA. The Falcon Telescope Network is a global network of small aperture (20 inch) telescopes developed by the Centre for Space Situational Awareness Research (CSSAR) in the Department of Physics at the U.S. Air Force Academy, in collaboration with educational partners. Falcon will be shared with U.S. and international university partners for the purpose of undergraduate space situational awareness (SSA) and astronomy research education as well as community STEM outreach.


The Space Situational Awareness Node can be found at UWA's Zadko Observatory in Gingin.
www.zadko-observatory.org

The Observatory is situated at Yeal between Yanchep National Park and the township of Gingin, twelve kilometres off Indian Ocean Drive (Wanneroo Road).

Node Leader

Professor David Coward
david.coward [at] uwa.edu.au
School of Physics, Maths and Computing
35 Stirling Highway
Crawley 6009 WA

Associate Professor David Coward

Lead: Space Situational Awareness

John Moore

Space Situational Awareness (Site Manager)

Dr Fiona Panther

Space Situational Awareness

John Kennewell

Space Situational Awareness

Arie Verveer

Instrumentation Expert

Dorota Mieczkowska

PhD

Evan Dilley

Observatory Systems Technical Officer