The Extremely Low-Resource Optical Identifier (ELROI) beacon is a concept for a milliwatt optical license plate" that can provide unique ID numbers for everything that goes into space. ELROI is designed to help address the problem of space object identification in the crowded space around the Earth, where over 16,000 objects - from active satellites to rocket bodies and debris - are currently tracked and monitored. Using photon counting to enable extreme background rejection in real time, the ID number can be uniquely identified from the ground in a few minutes, even if the ground station detects only a few photons per second. The ELROI concept has been validated in long-range ground tests. A first orbital prototype, integrated into the student CubeSat NMTSat, was launched in December 2018. We discuss our most recent attempts to observe this prototype, including our ground station and an outline of data analysis techniques, as well as the most recent optical signal characteristics for those interested in making observations with their own ground stations.

Date Published: 13 May 2019
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 10978, Advanced Photon Counting Techniques XIII, 1097808 (13 May 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2519906

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10978:
Advanced Photon Counting Techniques XIII
Mark A. Itzler; Joshua C. Bienfang; K. Alex McIntosh, Editor(s)