Seminars

Abstract: Space has become a crowded place. Space Domain Awareness focuses on collecting information and creating actionable awareness in all regions of space fairing; traditionally Space Domain Awareness is focused on near-Earth space, but with increased interest in the cislunar region Space Domain Awareness has expanded. For the information collection, in general, only non-resolved observations are available because of the small size of the objects relative to the large distance between the objects and the observers, limited by sensor aperture sizes, and in ground-based observations, by the atmospheric turbulence. This talk first shows a technique, in which atmospheric turbulence is not treated as a nuisance but can actually aid in the imaging of stabilized low-Earth satellites utilizing compressed sensing techniques, revealing information beyond the center of mass. It then addresses the challenges of Cislunar orbits; the effects of fragmentations in the cislunar space are shown.  A way of utilizing the bicircular restricted four-body problem to design constellations for complete surveillance of the cislunar plane is shown. 

Bio: Prof. Frueh got her PhD in Physics with a Specialization in Astronomy from the University of Bern, Switzerland. She is currently a faculty at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue at the rank of Associate Professor. Prior to joining Purdue, she was a TEES Research Scientist at the Aerospace Department of Texas A&M University and a National Research Council postdoc with the US Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland AFB, at the Space Vehicles Directorate. She is the director of the Purdue Optical Ground Station, and the chair of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Panel on Potentially Environmentally Detrimental Activities in Space (PEDAS).
Her research and expertise is focused on Space Situational Awareness and Space Domain Awareness including optical observations, multi-target tracking and detection, information theory, machine learning, low observability systems and object characterization.