BOPAS: The Bologna Observatory Pipeline for Astrometry of Satellites

Facing the increasing population of active and inactive objects along the different geocentric orbital regimes, the activities of Space Surveillance and Tracking are becoming more and more important for any efficient Space Traffic Management and Policy effort in order to quantify and (when possible) mitigate the collision risk with/among any space debris. However, the astrometric observations of resident space objects, including space debris, are not easy: due to their high angular speed, to get a good orbit solution, a temporal precision of the order of a few milliseconds and the ability to measure the position of streaks are required. These observational difficulties are similar to those encountered in the astrometry of very fast near-Earth asteroids as they pass closer to Earth. We developed our own image processing pipeline for astrometry of satellite streaks, and tested it with observations of resident space objects and near-Earth asteroids from our telescope asset for Space Surveillance and Tracking, obtaining astrometric errors in the order of 1 arcsec. We propose our pipeline as a valid tool among the other ones in the literature. The software presented in this paper could also be useful to process observations of fast NEAs, and is freely available on GitHub, where anyone can download and adapt it as needed.