Microstrip patch antennas are widely employed in several applications, thanks to their low profile, low cost, and easy manufacturing. However, the demand for new technologies providing compactness and high performance poses a long-lasting challenge for the antenna designer. Traditional methods for bandwidth improvement and size reduction have some drawbacks, tied mostly to poor radiation performance or troublesome implementation. In this letter, a novel, simple, but effective patch antenna layout exploiting the customizable form factor guaranteed by 3-D printing (or other fabrication techniques) is presented. An appropriate modification in the vertical profile of the radiator is introduced. Specifically, without loss of generality, a cylindrical shape has been selected as a proof of concept. The proposed solution allows to increase the impedance bandwidth from 2.9% of a standard flat microstrip patch to 9%. Additionally, the projected antenna resonant size can be reduced up to 38% compared to its flat counterpart.
Space debris are orbiting objects that represent a major threat for space operations. The most used countermeasure to face this threat is, by far, collision avoidance, namely the set of maneuvers that allow to avoid a collision with the space debris. Since collision avoidance is tightly related to the knowledge of the debris state (position and speed), the observation of the orbital debris is the key of the problem. In this work a bistatic radar configuration named BIRALET (BIstatic RAdar for LEO Tracking) is used to detect a set of space debris at 410 MHz, using the Sardinia Radio Telescope as the receiver antenna. The signal-to-noise ratio, the Doppler shift and the frequency spectrum for each debris are reported.
Space debris monitoring is nowadays a priority for worldwide space agencies, due to the serious threat that these objects present. More and more efforts have been made to extend the network of available radar systems devoted to the control of space. A meticulous review has been done in this paper, in order to find and classify the considerable amounts of data provided by the scientific community that deal with RADAR measurement for the debris monitoring and tracking. The information gathered is organized based on the volume of found data and classified taking into account the geographical location of the facilities.
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