Serendipitous Detection of Orbital Debris by the International Liquid Mirror Telescope: First Results
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Orbital debris presents a growing risk to space operations, and is becoming a significant source of contamination of astronomical images. Much of the debris population is uncatalogued, making the impact more difficult to assess. We present initial results from the first ten nights of commissioning observations with the International Liquid Mirror Telescope, in which images were examined for streaks produced by orbiting objects including satellites, rocket bodies and other forms of debris. We detected 83 streaks and performed a correlation analysis to attempt to match these with objects in the public database. 48% of these objects were uncorrelated, indicating substantial incompleteness in the database, even for some relatively-bright objects. We were able to detect correlated objects to an estimated magnitude of 14.5 and possibly about two magnitudes greater for the faintest uncorrelated object.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".