Analysis of Galileo Style Geostationary Satellite Imaging: Image Reconstruction

Earlier this year DARPA announced the Galileo project, with the basic conceptual idea of using optical interferometry to combine the light from two telescopes, with one of them being movable, to image geostationary satellites. This project aims at obtaining a NIIRS 8 image of a geosat with a resolution of 10cm. The design of this experiment creates challenging issues for the reconstruction of a satellite image. Among these issues are the lack of information about the absolute phase of the baselines, the difficulty of observing with short baselines, and the time needed to obtain enough pointings to appropriately sample the UV-plane. Here we use interferometric simulations to discuss these issues.