19th May 2026 – Steve Weddell

[Orlon Petterson]

Kia ora

This months speaker at the monthly meeting is Steve Weddell formerly of the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at UC.

 

Advanced Instrumentation for Space-debris and Space-craft Detection & Identification at UC

With the support of external (Marsden) and internal (UC) grants totalling just over NZ$1M, research was conducted between 2019 and 2022 at the University of Canterbury in Electrical & Computer Engineering and at UC’s Mt John Observatory on optical wavefront sensing and advanced image processing methods to detect large space-debris objects, which were observed using 1-m class telescopes through the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere.
To coincide with RocketLab’s launch from New Zealand in 2022 of their first Lunar booster, and with assistance from the New Zealand Space Agency (NZSA), our group entered into discussions with NASA concerning the possibility of optically verifying the position of the Capstone U-12 CubeSat in cisLunar space. Over a 12 month period, telescopes from UC’s Mt. John Observatory were used, which were fitted with new and existing electro-optical instrumentation and sensors, in an attempt to verify Capstone’s position.
A brief overview about our Marsden research will be discussed, and some results will be presented using our adaptive optics “rig”, with an additional experimental interferometric sensor to aid in the detection of satellites in cisLunar space.

[Author]

Posts