CubeSat-Based Passive Bistatic Radar for Space Situational Awareness: A Feasibility Study

Abstract

This paper proposes a low budget solution to detect and possibly track space debris and satellites in Low Earth Orbit. The concept consists of a space-borne radar installed on a cubeSat flying at low altitude and detecting the occultations of radio signals coming from existing satellites flying at higher altitudes. The paper investigates the feasibility and performance of such a passive bistatic radar system. Key performance metrics considered in this paper are: the minimum size of detectable objects, considering visibility and frequency constraints on existing radio sources, the receiver size, and the compatibility with current cubeSat's technology. Different illuminator types and receiver altitudes are considered under the assumption that all illuminators and receivers are on circular orbits.

GNSS‐based passive UAV monitoring: a feasibility study

“…In order to get a coarse estimation of this maximum operational range, an investigation on the link budget of the system is performed. Similarly to [19], the considered figure of merit is the signal to noise ratio (SNR), which for a single pulse is [25] where the different parameters are described in Table 1 along with their typical values derived from [19, 26]. It should be noted that the processing gain is calculated as the time bandwidth product of the signal, i.e.…”

GNSS Based Passive Radar for UAV Monitoring

“…For this reason, a preliminary estimation of the required link budget is performed. The figure of merit for this analysis is the signal to noise ratio (SNR), which for a single pulse in the surveillance channel is [11], [15]:…”

“…After generating the reconstructed signal in (15) the system correlates it with the signal from the surveillance channel. By design, the signals transmitted from different satellites are orthogonal, thus the cross correlation between the reconstructed signal (15) and the surveillance channel (12) can be expressed as:…”

SISAR imaging for space debris based on nanosatellites

“…This work reported on the detection performance of a ground‐based passive system using as an illuminator of opportunity the Global Navigation Satellites and introduced methods for improving the weak scattered signals coming from space debris. Inspired by Benson [7] in our earlier work [8], we proposed a novel system for space debris detection tracking and characterisation. The system consists of a passive space‐borne radar installed on one or more nanosatellites flying in LEO.…”

“…Also, this proposed system benefits from current sensors in terms of cost, spatial and temporal coverage. As shown in [8], due to the lower relative velocities between the transmitter and receiver, integration time can be significantly enhanced and thus, detection performance is increased. The orbital parameters of such a system can be dynamically chosen, providing spatial coverage at specific altitudes of interest.…”