GEO SATELLITES’ MANUFACTORING MARKERS FROM PHOTOMETRIC COLORS

We present the photometric analysis of 23 GEO satellites, by using more than 1,200 multi-band images acquired in the Johnson-Cousin photometric system (BVRI). The dataset was acquired by three optical telescopes geographically located in different observational sites (in Italy and Mexico). By using an observational strategy based on alternating the V-R-I filter-sequence, we obtained consecutive multi-band images we used to reconstruct satellites’ color-lightcurves. We calculated the color-indexes of GEO satellites by taking into account the average value of color-lightcurves. We investigated the color-indexes in the color-color planes. Moreover, we studied a possible correlation among colors and satellite manufacturing and peculiar features.
We obtained that some of the considered parameters seem to significantly affect the color indexes.