Autonomous illumination payloads for space traffic management.The planned operations of the LEDSAT demonstration mission

The increasing congestion in the LEO environment requires a more precise and reliable tracking of all the in-orbit objects to prevent the increase of collision risks and new debris creation. In the perspective of the new generation Space Traffic Management tasks, the utilization of Light Emitting Diode-based payloads for small satellite platforms would greatly increase the optical trackability of small satellites throughout their life cycle for the benefit of all the users of orbital technologies. The LEDSAT mission has been conceived by Sapienza University of Rome and University of Michigan for demonstrating a LED-based payload for ground-based optical tracking. The satellite project is participating in the ESA Fly Your Satellite! Programme and it is supported by ASI (Italian Space Agency) within the IKUNS Programme. The spacecraft is equipped with 140 LEDs in three different colors, mounted on all the external faces of the CubeSat. The satellite will perform optimized flashing patterns for maximizing the acquirable orbital and attitude information that can be extracted from optical observations. Furthermore, the satellite will demonstrate how such kind of payloads could greatly help identifying small satellites through identifier flashing patterns soon after launch, with particular regards to cluster launches that often do not allow a precise identification of the spacecraft for the first days upon deployment. Finally, the satellite will demonstrate an innovative, low data rate, light-based backup communication method to be used by future satellites experiencing a failure of the transceiving systems. If successful, the LED payloads designed implemented on LEDSAT could be transferred to many other satellite missions to improve their trackability and to mitigate the risks of in-orbit collisions. LEDSAT has been launched on 17 August 2021 and another satellite, named WildTrackCube-SIMBA, has been launched on 22 March 2021 with LEDs on-board. This paper deals with the planned operations of both LEDSAT and WildTrackCube-SIMBA for STM tasks and demonstration of the LED-based payload. After an introduction on the design of the LED boards, the planned operations are described in detail. The paper is concluded with a preliminary report of the carried out operations, which include a verification of the early recognition through LED observations and preliminary orbit determination, plus the pattern recognition for WildTrackCube-SIMBA, on LED observations and with the conclusions chapter.