Patent ID: 9423341
Filing Date: 2016-08-23
CPC Classification: B64G,G01N

Claim Text:
1. A method comprising detecting faint magnitude ˜10 or greater (fainter) near IR reflections, providing interruptible and rapidly re-taskable ground-based intelligent network of autonomous globally distributed real-time interactive continuous 24/7 operating sensors, the providing the sensors comprising providing dedicated optical instruments having large focal ratios and large apertures, providing the instruments with a polarizer and a camera head, providing a window in the camera head, J, Kshort, H and K-band filters with a range of 1-3 μm wavelengths and detectors in a focal plane aligned with the window lenses and filters, the focal plane having 300 or more pixels, cryocooling the focal plane and camera optics, and repeatedly imaging a single area of sky during daytime, twilight, and nighttime with image integration times between 0.1 seconds and 180 seconds and coadding hundreds of image frames of the single area of sky and thereby removing star images and sky brightness changes, filtering wavelengths between 1 and 3 μm, reducing sky background, eliminating scattered sunlight longer than 1 μm and thermal wavelengths shorter than 3 μm, wherein the focal numbers greater than 5 reduce effect of sky brightness and thus lower noise, and wherein the coadding of the frames includes background subtraction in order to remove very bright sky backgrounds, wherein the detecting comprises daytime, twilight and nighttime detecting of deep space resident space-objects (RSOs).