Aerospace Instrument-Making Annotation << Back EFFICIENCY ESTIMATE OF GROUND-BASED THERMAL IMAGING EQUIPMENT FOR DETECTING ARTIFICIAL EARTH SATELLITES V.A. Ovsyannikov, Ya.V. Ovsyannikov This article proposes an engineering model for predicting the shell temperature of artificial satellites of Earth and offers numerical estimates of this temperature. A methodology has been developed to promptly estimate the signal-to-noise ratio for ground-based and spacebased thermal imaging equipment operating in the 3–5 μm or 8–12 μm spectral ranges and using modern quantum matrix photodetectors. This equipment is used for 24-hour detection (including automatic realtime detection) of orbiting space objects, especially those in the shadow of Earth and therefore inaccessible to detection in the visible and near infrared spectral ranges. The methodology takes into account the threshold sensitivity of the equipment determined by such factors as external photon noise caused by radiation from the atmosphere and from the lens of the equipment, internal dark noise, readout noise, and spatial noise caused by non-uniform sensitivity of the elements of the photodetector. Using a simple correlation and the results of the calculations performed, this methodology relates the temperature and diameter of the spherical shell of the satellite, the distance to it, and the diameter of the lens of the equipment to the output signal-to-noise ratio. The results obtained in the article provide a justifi cation of the requirements for the main technical parameters of promising thermal imaging equipment designed to detect space objects, as well as an effi ciency prediction for existing models of such equipment. Keywords: thermal imaging equipment, artificial Earth satellite, space object detection. DOI: 10.25791/aviakosmos.11.2022.1305 Pp. 03-11.