Arcsecond-level astrometry of fast Near-Earth Asteroids and Resident Space Objects with the TANDEM system

In the context of Space Surveillance and Tracking and Planetary Defense, tracking near-Earth asteroids through optical observations plays a significant role. However, the astrometric observations of these bodies are not easy, as they pass closer to Earth: due to their fast apparent motion, 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 resident space objects in the Earth orbital environment. Facing the increasing population of active and inactive artificial satellites 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 risk of collision between these objects. We developed our own image processing pipeline for astrometry of satellite streaks, and tested it with observations of near-Earth asteroids and resident space objects 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 we present is freely available on GitHub, where anyone can download and adapt it as needed.