Leveraging existing radio-astronomy infrastructure for space situational awareness
Abstract
Leveraging existing radio-astronomy infrastructure for space situational awareness Debris detection and tracking is becoming an increasingly important component of the strategy to commercialise LEO space. Australia is ideally situated to contribute to this activity based on geographic location and existing infrastructure. The current geographical spread of the Space Surveillance Network (SSN) is concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere. This results in a bias in the catalogue of TLE (retrieved January 2020), especially considering objects which exhibit a 10dB difference in (radar) signal-to-noise (SNR) when observed at perigee versus apogee (corresponding to an eccentricity > 0.125). It can be shown that such objects with perigees in the Southern Hemisphere are observed less than half as often than those with perigees in the Northern Hemisphere. Australia has a rich legacy of radioastronomy. Existing operational infrastructure covers a diverse range of architectures including aperture arrays, arrays of dishes with relatively wide fields of view and arrays of dishes with wide frequency coverage, as well as large single dishes. Examples include MWA, ASKAP, Parkes and the ATCA. Australia's geographic location and existing capability provide rich options for developing systems specific to debris detection which are also complementary to the existing SSN. We focus on small debris (2cm diameter) in LEO. We develop the system requirements for detecting such debris and present a range of architectures, and processing techniques such a system might incorporate. We show that such a system is possible and highlight the resulting trade-offs made in design decisions for these systems.
- Publication:
-
43rd COSPAR Scientific Assembly. Held 28 January - 4 February
- Pub Date:
- January 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021cosp...43E2212H