  In survey series of unknown Earth orbiting objects, no a priori orbital
elements are available. In surveys of wide field telescopes possibly many
nonresolved object images are present on the single frames of the series.
Reliable methods have to be found to associate the object images stemming from
the same object with each other, so-called linking. The presence of cosmic ray
events, so-called Cosmics, complicates reliable linking of non-resolved images.
The tracklets of object images allow to extract exact positions for a first
orbit determination. A two step method is used and tested on observation frames
of space debris surveys of the ESA Space Debris Telescope, located on Tenerife,
Spain: In a first step a cosmic filter is applied in the single observation
frames. Four different filter approaches are compared and tested in
performance. In a second step, the detected object images are linked on
observation series based on the assumption of a linear accelerated movement of
the objects over the frame during the series, which is updated with every
object image, that could be successfully linked.

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics