with Sodankyla ̈ Geophysical Observatory ESA/ESOC Technical Management

• Main Authors: J Markkanen, M Lehtinen, A Huuskonen, R Jehn
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2002
• Subjects: Svalbard; EISCAT
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.503.3188; http://www.sgo.fi/~jussi/spade/FR_16Apr2002.pdf

CONTRACT REPORT The work described in this report was done under ESA contract. Responsibility for the contents resides in the authors or organizations that prepared it. Our main objective in this ESA contract study was to define a concept how an existing European radar can be used to detect and characterize small-size space debris (SD) by applying low cost hardware and software upgrades. We concentrate on the EISCAT incoherent scatter ionospheric radars, located in northern Scandinavia and on Svalbard. We show performance estimates which indicate that the EISCAT UHF (930 MHz) radar is the most sensitive and accurate of the EISCAT radars for SD work. The expected performance is the same as the German FGAN radar performance. For parameter estimation we apply Bayesian statistical inversion. We start from a four-parameter model (amplitude, target range, ve-