Abstract
Space debris is internationally recognized as a planetary threat. Efforts to enhance the worldwide radar monitoring networks have been intensified in the last years. Among the new radars employed for the observations, one of the most promising is the Bistatic Radar for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Tracking (BIRALET), which employs the Sardinia Radio Telescope as a receiving segment. The Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) has recently been proven to be a reliable instrument for space debris monitoring and, for this purpose, over the years has undergone some substantial modifications in order to be able to rise to the status of a fully functional radar receiver. However, an extensive measurement campaign, in order to assess the real potential of the radar, has never been done before. In this paper, the authors present the first real space debris measurement campaign of the SRT, made between December 2018 and October 2019 using the new dedicated channel of the P-band receiver. A total of 27 objects were correctly detected during this campaign, characterized by a radar cross section (RCS) interval between 0.13 and 13.4 m2 and a range interval between 459 and 1224 km.
Highlights
Based on recent estimates, the number of orbital debris in space amounts to 139 million [1]
The beam-park mode is employed for the survey of space debris, illuminating a specific portion of the sky and waiting for the objects to cross the field of view (FOV) of the antenna
In the last six years, the BIRALET system has been actively involved in the European space debris monitoring program, following an upgrade schedule that culminated in the installation of a dedicated receiving channel
Summary
The number of orbital debris in space amounts to 139 million [1]. These first results, encouraging, showed the shortcomings of the employed system, tied to the inadequacy of the back-end (e.g., speed of the frequency sweep tied to the resolution bandwidth selected, poor processing capabilities, and missing information due to the sampling time), which was mainly used for the primary mission of the radiotelescope, i.e., radioastronomical observations [9,14] Because of these limitations, in a recent paper, the authors presented the design and realization of a new space debris dedicated channel for the SRT [12,13]. The results show that the estimated Doppler shift was predicted with a maximum error of about 1 kHz
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