Third Long-March 5B re-entry campaign through Italian space surveillance radars

Le résumé fourni par la source

The current overpopulation of orbiting objects requires Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) services. Among these, the monitoring of re-entry events plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety of people and infrastructure on Earth. The work discusses the third Long-March 5B re-entry campaign, which took place from October 31st to November 4th, 2022. This was coordinated, at a European level, by the Space Situational Awareness Centre (C-SSA) of the Italian Air Force (Aeronautica Militare, AM), in collaboration with the AM Flight Test Department, the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Astrophysics National Institute (INAF). Support was granted by other Italian institutions, like Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi). Besides the description of the overall re-entry campaign, this work focuses on the innovative contribution given by the Bistatic Radar for LEO survey (BIRALES), an Italian bistatic radar system managed by INAF with the support of PoliMi. Although the challenging off-nominal conditions, BIRALES was capable to acquire observation data throughout the entire campaign, providing both range, range-rate and angular track measurements to the C-SSA. The latter measurements were obtained through a novel approach based on an adaptive beamforming technique, which allows to reach a high-quality track. To obtain a re-entry epoch prediction, orbit determination results are computed starting from the last BIRALES observations without transit prediction, by also including measurements from the MFDR-MR sensor, a tracking radar managed by AM that participated in the campaign. A novel approach is also presented to estimate the ballistic coefficient in a stochastic way, and this estimation is used in both the orbit determination and the re-entry analysis. The re-entry epoch prediction computed in this way is fully consistent with the reference one provided by the U.S. Space Command.

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