Has anyone seen an actual spectrum of a satellite made by an amateur photographer?

Question

If you use a shallow wedge prism or very low dispersion diffraction grating (e.g. circa 100 lines/mm) front of a camera, you can photograph the spectra of stars with a modern DSLR camera with a fast, wide field lens fairly easily I believe.

If one prepared for a bright satellite pass and oriented the dispersion perpendicular to the expected path, one could capture the evolving spectrum of the satellite as it tumbled or passed in or out of Earth's shadow. You'd have to do a little processing/averaging of the image to get a spectrum.

Has anyone seen an image like this published somewhere, or has made one of them oneself?

One example of the kind of hardware I'm talking about his this, but it would be better to use something with very low dispersion but without blocking the full aperture of the lens.

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I don't mean to advocate a commercial product, this is a handy example, and Tom Field is a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine.

above: from here.

above: from here

Answer 1

Satellites, for the most part, do not emit visible light. Instead, they reflect light. Thus, other than portions of that light that are absorbed/scattered by the various reflective surfaces of the satellite, the spectra measured will be that of the light source shining upon them.

When satellites are bright enough to be seen at night on the earth's surface, the light is usually being reflected by antennae or solar panels that act very much like mirrors without absorbing much of any of the light falling on them.¹ We can see them because although we are standing in the dark after the terminator between daylight and dark has passed our position, the satellites in orbit above our heads are high enough to still be bathed in sunlight.

In other words, it will look pretty much like what one gets when they measure the spectrum of our sun, Sol.

_{¹ In the case of solar panels, they do absorb much of the (infrared) light falling on them. But when we can see them from the earth's surface, we are seeing light that is falling on the panel at an angle where much of it, at least in the visible wavelengths, is reflected, rather than absorbed as it would be at other angles.}