
A Real-Time Space Debris Detection System for BIRALES

D. Cutajar et al. (2019), JBIS, 72, pp.102-108
Refcode: 2019.72.102
Keywords: Orbital debris, Radar, Detection, Clustering
Abstract:The ever increasing satellite population in near-Earth orbit has made the monitoring and tracking of cooperative and
non-cooperative objects ever more important. Non-cooperative objects, or space debris, pose a threat to existing and
future satellites as they cannot avoid potential collisions. Furthermore, the orbit of the smaller debris is often not actively
monitored. As the population grows, the risk of a collision increases. Thus, various institutions around the world have been
upgrading their space detection capabilities in order to better monitor the objects orbiting Earth down to a few centimetres
in diameter. One of the latest such systems is the BIstatic RAdar for LEo Survey (BIRALES) space debris detection
system based in Italy. The BIRALES system is a bistatic radar composed of a radio transmitter in Sardinia and the Medicina
Northern Cross radio telescope near Bologna as the receiver. The backend of this system includes a digital beamformer
able to synthetize 32 beams covering the instrument’s Field of View (FoV). As a high-velocity object transits, its Doppler
shift signature (or track) can be measured. Whilst a number of streak detection algorithms have been proposed for optical
telescopes, the number of detection algorithms for high-speed objects for bistatic radars is limited. This work describes the
detection algorithm used in the BIRALES space debris detection pipeline. The detection algorithm takes the beamformed,
channelized data as input. Firstly, the data undergoes a number of pre-processing stages before the potential space
debris candidates are identified. Secondly, the candidates are validated against a number of criteria in order to improve the
detection quality. The algorithm was designed to process the incoming data across 32 beams in real-time. Initial validation
results on known objects are positive and the system has been shown to reliably determine orbiting objects with minimal
false positives.
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