http://satobs.org/seesat_ref/misc/ison_study.pdfTracking and Identifying Anonymous ISON Satellites
The Russian based ISON (International Scientific Optical Network) provides a weekly update of a catalog
listing manmade objects in Earth orbit for which no obvious match exists. The “ISON catalog” is
maintained at
http://spacedata.vimpel.ru/ As stated on that website, “Orbits with a period of over 200
minutes are mainly investigated, which basically include geostationary space objects and objects with
large eccentricity orbits.
One of the other main entities that track satellites is ISON. As stated on the data portal, “OJSC Vimpel,
which has a unique 40-years’ experience in developing , testing and practical implementation of
software for carrying out the various tasks associated with maintaining the catalog of artificial space
objects…Hundreds of previously unknown space debris objects were found, including substantially large
objects, that formed over decades of space activity, but which were not duly tracked by ground-based
monitoring stations and as a result have been lost.” This situation can come about from the many
difficulties faced when tracking the tens of thousands of objects in orbit above us.
Among the hundreds of ISON objects are most of the classified satellites cataloged (as classfd.tle) and
tracked by Seesat. Through the arduous efforts of many observers and analysts, most of the classfd.tle
objects were correlated with ISON objects prior to this study. However, there remained a fair number of
objects being routinely tracked by ISON that were reported to have standard magnitudes of 8.0 or
brighter. This indicated these objects might be independently monitored by hobbyists, and perhaps
identified. I had been observing ISON objects but had not systematically approached tracking them. I
developed an unidentified ISON target list, widened my approach with global remote imaging, and set
these goals:
1. Identify more of these anonymous ISON objects using the Space-Track and Seesat TLE files
2. Determine which objects are consistently trackable using equipment available to amateurs
3. Identify origin of objects that are trackable but do not directly correlate with known objects
Over the course of a yearlong effort, 153 anonymous objects from the ISON catalog were observed to
determine ones that were trackable and potentially identifiable. 89 objects were reported with at least
one set of positional data. Of the 52 total objects identified by Seesat, 35 were found by this imaging
and tracking method. 44 of the total 52 hits were found in the unclassified catalog. The 8 classified
objects involved have since become unclassified and appear in the Space Track catalog.