A First Look at Earth’s Orbital Space Measured with the Evryscopes

With the Evryscopes, we observe a population of short-duration single-image transients that are diluted by a fog of star-like glints. Satellites and debris in Earth-orbit can produce short flashes that form a potentially dense foreground of false-positive detections in optical transient surveys (Corbett 2020, ApJL). We need to understand the orbital distribution of this Earth-orbiting population of flashes to mitigate their effect on transient astronomy. The Evryscopes are a north-south pair of all-sky systems consisting of small-aperture telescopes that operate on a two-minute cadence; they reach a limiting magnitude of g=16 with a sampling of 13 arcsec / pixel and enable us to monitor a field-of-view of 16,512 sq. deg., using the Evryscope Fast Transient Engine (EFTE). In this talk we present first results from the orbital modeling extension of EFTE, EFTE-Rocks, the first systematic characterization of small Earth-orbiting objects, as seen by Evryscope.