Page:SATCON2 Algorithms Report.pdf/4



This report is part of a collection of Working Group Reports from the SATCON2 Conference.

The published report following SATCON1 (Walker et al., 2020) detailed 10 recommendations, three of which apply to the development of software; these three are the focus of the SATCON2 Algorithm Working Group:

Recommendation 1

Support development of a software application available to the general astronomy community to identify, model, subtract, and mask satellite trails in images on the basis of user-supplied parameters.

Recommendation 2

''Support development of a software application for observation planning available to the general astronomy community that predicts the time and projection of satellite transits through an image, given celestial position, time of night, exposure length, and field of view, based on the public database of ephemerides. Current simulation work provides a strong basis for the development of such an application.''

Recommendation 3

''Support selected detailed simulations of the effects on data analysis systematics and data reduction signal-to-noise impacts of masked trails on scientific programs affected by satellite constellations. Aggregation of results should identify any lower thresholds for the brightness or rate of occurrence of satellite trails that would significantly reduce their negative impact on the observations.''

We have attempted to transform these SATCON1 recommendations into a specific set of high-level software requirements with provisional names for convenience of reference. We note that each of these is a fairly major software effort if they are to be robust enough to support the community. However, in some cases relevant software already exists, and this document identifies those packages. Rh