Abstract

Near-Earth object (NEO) detection, transient astronomical event detection, and Space Situational Awareness (SSA) support are all provided by wide-field, high cadence synoptic telescope surveys. Many such exquisite and monolithic synoptic surveys achieve impressive performance and are certainly changing these application areas. In the past 15 years Raven-class telescopes have made a clear case for the utility of commercial-off-the-shelf systems in SSA. This paper documents the initial efforts and next steps for the Omnidirectional Space Situational Awareness (OmniSSA) array, a wide-field-of-view synoptic survey system that leverages the Raven-class telescope paradigm. The approach utilizes multiple overlapping wide field-of-view sensors with post-processing super resolution and image stacking techniques to generate synthetic images equivalent to larger wide field-of-view systems. The synthetic array offers potential to utilize a plurality of components that are individually low cost and commercial off-the-shelf. A brief survey of synoptic survey systems is presented, followed by a description of the current hardware implementation of the OmniSSA array and preliminary out-of-the-box results for baseline OmniSSA camera SR and image stacking routines.