Adaptive quantum accelerated imaging for space domain awareness

Abstract

The growth in space activity has increased the need for Space Domain Awareness (SDA) to ensure safe space operations. Imaging and detecting space targets is, however, challenging due to their dim appearance, small angular size/separation, dense distribution, and atmospheric turbulence. These challenges render space targets in ground-based imaging observations as point-like objects in the sub-Rayleigh regime, with extreme brightness contrast but a low photon budget. Here, we propose to use the recently developed quantum-accelerated imaging (QAI) for the SDA challenge. We mainly focus on three SDA challenges (1) minimal a priori assumptions (2) many-object problem (3) extreme brightness ratio. We also present results on source estimation and localization in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. QAI shows significantly improved estimation in position, brightness, and number of targets for all SDA challenges. In particular, we demonstrate up to 2.5 times better performance in source detection than highly optimized direct imaging in extreme scenarios like stars with a 1000 times brightness ratio. With over 10 000 simulations, we verify the increased resolution of our approach compared to conventional state-of-the-art direct imaging paving the way towards quantum optics approaches for SDA.