with EISCAT Scientific Association ESA/ESOC Technical Management

• Main Authors: J Markkanen, M Postila, M Landgraf
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: EISCAT
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.600.5450; http://www.sgo.fi/~jussi/spade/FRII_21feb2005.pdf

The work described in this report was done under ESA contract. Responsibility for the contents resides in the authors or organizations that prepared it. JM Generated from LATEX source, August 15, 2012. Following a feasibility study in 2000–2001 about using EISCAT radars to detect centimetre-sized space debris in the frame of an ESA contract, the present study was aimed at doing the debris detection and parameter esti-mation in real-time. A requirement in our work is to “piggy-back ” space debris measurements on top of EISCAT’s normal ionospheric work, without interfering with those measurements, and to be able to handle on the order of 500 hours of measurements per year. We use a special digital receiver in parallel to EISCAT’s standard receiver. We sample fast enough to cor-rectly band-pass sample the EISCAT analog frequency band. To increase detection sensitivity, we use amplitude domain integration—coherent pulse-to-pulse integration—of the samples. The coherent integration is built into