Research on the visibility of low‐orbit debris using space‐borne radar

Abstract

Space debris with size larger than 1 cm poses a threat to spacecraft. Recently, space debris surveillance, tracking and early warning become far more urgent than ever before owing to the explosive growth of the number of debris. At the base of these problems is how to determine the visibility of debris to observation equipment, which will be discussed in this study. The statistics related to the orbital altitude, inclination and eccentricity of space debris are presented first, and then the principles of orbital parameter design of the space-borne radar (SBR) are given. Next, systemic parameters of SBR, such as wavelength, antenna type, are determined upon the observation aim. Detectable debris subset is preliminarily selected in accordance with some constraints. At last, based on the simplified general perturbations (SGP4) model, the range and velocity vectors of debris to SBR at specific time are calculated. Another expression form of relative position between debris and radar, range, azimuth and elevation (RAE) course is obtained by means of coordinate rotation which can be accomplished by directing projection or rotational matrix. The RAE data guide file can be used to carry on guidance tracking. Furthermore, the conversion accuracy of two different coordinate transformation methods is also analysed.

Simulation and Observational Evaluation of Space Debris Detection by Sanya Incoherent Scatter Radar

“…According to the latest data published by the European Space Agency, there exists 1,036,500 pieces of space debris larger than 1 cm in diameter around our Earth, but only approximately 3% (30,040) of them with larger sizes were cataloged (Ruchi & Arpit, 2021). Among the space debris not cataloged, the part with a diameter between 1 and 10 cm was the most dangerous (Zhao et al., 2015). The threat comes from the lack of their predictive location information as well as the failure of the passive protection.…”

Practical implementation of the spectrogram‐inverse Radon transform based algorithm for resident space objects parameter estimation

“…The design of this type of radar for space debris detection has been studied in [15] and the space-based detection including more realistic space condition in discussed in [17]. The concept of space-based radar for debris detection considering existing debris statistics has been more recently analysed by [18,19].…”

A multi-spacecraft formation approach to space debris surveillance

“…Though the exploitation of the radar technology has been proposed in the past [19] [20] [21], its on-board implementation requires considerable expenditure in terms of power consumption, spacecraft size and mass with limited benefits in terms of performance [23]. Therefore, the utilization of optical sensors appears to be a viable solution for this kind of missions [8].…”