Spectral Light Curve Simulation for Parameter Estimation from Space Debris

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Given the increasing necessity to monitor RSO in space, tools like the one the authors present in this paper are of great interest, specially in the efforts to characterize objects in space through optical observation. I found this work well written, the tool presented seams to me really promising and interesting.

I recommend this work for publication. I would like to just make few suggestions that do not interfere with my recommendation, but that in my opinion would be very useful for some readers. 

pg 5 - in the last paragraph before section 3.1, when the authors say "under the assumption that any forces acting on the target,...., are too small to have a significant effect on its rotation over the time span of a simulation", in my opinion if some order of magnitude or if any kind of number comparison is provided it would make the argument stronger.

pg11- Figure 10. Considering that the authors mentioned in the text (pg 10) that the observations at Uhlandsholhe research observatory were calibrated with a series of stars. It would be very interesting if they can provide the comparison of this figure also in magnitudes.

pg 16- Finally when the authors say "To restrict the computational effort of initial attempts,..." It would be very useful if they could give some numbers to exemplify what is the computational effort they are talking about.

Congratulation for the nice work.

 

Author Response

Thank you for your efforts to review our paper. We very much appreciate your positive feedback and acknowledge the validity of your remarks.

• Concerning the first point you make: Naturally it is hard to generalise on this aspect, as forces affecting a target are highly dependant on the shape and mass distribution as well as a target's orbit. However to provide a more comprehensive reasoning for our assumption we have added some typical reference observations from literature and our previous work.
• Concerning your second point: You are correct in assuming that it would be possible to present the observations in magnitude values. However, as we use non-standard observation bands we decided that magnitude values may be misleading and would most likely not be intuitive for readers. Therefore we decided to present everything in SI units.
•  Concerning your third point: We have added further details to help readers gain a better understanding of the computation cost of simulations.

Thank you very much for your helpful feedback. 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is devoted to a urgent topic that is interesting for many readers. The article is well organized and has a clear content. All the provisions are well-founded. Drawings and graphs illustrate the text and also look interesting for future readers. I think that the article can be published in this form.

Author Response

Thank you for taking the time to review our paper. We very much appreciate your positive feedback.

Reviewer 3 Report

The presented paper deals with a spectral light-curve simulator to address parameter estimation of orbital objects. 

Figures are adequate and well described in didascaly.

Section 1 provides a brief introduction of the concerning problem. The literate review is detailed. But it can be enriched by some papers by NASA ODPD such as some papers by Dr. H.M. Cowarin.

Section 3 could outline more the novelty of the presented simulation that combines the spectral engine (Mitsuba2) and the radiative transfer library (libRadTran). A flowchart can be added to figure 2.

Future work with the cooperation between satellite manufacturers and the research group will provide crucial data

Author Response

Thank you for you for reviewing our work. Your feedback has been very helpful and we have adjusted the paper to comply with your comments. We noticed a few spelling mistakes and have tried to emphasise the novelty of our simulation.

We would be very grateful if you would take another look at the adjustments we have made.