Has there been any serious attempt to take a photograph of the damaged bird using ground based optical telescopes while it is in sunlight ?
It's not going to work. AO-40 just isn't big enough. For fun, let's worth through some of the details.
With modern telescopes such as http://www.refractortelescopes.co.uk/reviews/orion/orion-shorttube-80-a-refr... or similiar and a modern digital camera and a known RA/DEC co-ordinate of the satellite at any point in its orbit, it should be possible get a fairly decent picture of what is still up there...
Note RA / DEC are astronomy co-ordinates which should be able to be calculated from AZ/EL or TLE, but I may not be able to do it myself.
We don't need to track it, but just to image it in several consecutive frames. From: http://www.emergentspace.com/pubs/AIAA_GNC_2002_AMSAT_A040.pdf
Table 1. Nominal Orbit Parameters for AO-40 Orbit Parameter Value Semimajor Axis (km) 36,245 Perigee Height (km) 1,042 Apogee Height (km) 58,691 Eccentricity 0.797 Inclination (deg) 6.04 Period (hours) 19.1
Let's look at a couple of potential telescopes. The short tube refractor that you linked to has an 80 mm (roughly 3 inch) aperature. According to the Rayleigh criterion, that scope should be able to resolve angles as small as about 1.5 arc seconds. At perigee, the resolving power is 1042000 * tan(1.5 arc seconds), or about 7.5 meters (or 25 feet). To increase the resolution by a factor of 2, you need to to double the aperature. To get resolutions down to 1/2 a foot, you need an aperature 50x larger, or 150 inches.
This doesn't take into account any effects of atmosphere either. it's actually fairly rare to get sub arcsecond resolution from any earthbound telescope without using adaptive optics. This limits the practicality of high resolution imaging.
Impressive photos of the space shuttle, ISS and HST have been taken using amateur equipment, but these objects are both closer and an order of magnitude larger than AO-40. While we might be able to measure spin rate and the like by measuring the brightness curve, actual imaging of the satellite isn't likely.
73 Mark K6HX