Daniel Finch, Silentium Defence; James Palmer, Silentium Defence; Ben White, Silentium Defence; Si Tran Nguyen, Silentium Defence
Keywords: Passive radar, launch
Abstract:
In December 2021, Silentium Defence opened the ‘Oculus’ observatory hosting the MAVERICK S series radar – the first purpose-built Space Situational Awareness (SSA) sensor utilising passive radar technology.
Passive radar, unlike traditional radar, utilises radio frequency (RF) energy already in the environment to obtain radar detections. The MAVERICK radar at Oculus exploits FM radio broadcasts transmitted from multiple sites across south-eastern Australia. Located up to 400 km from the observatory, these broadcast sites collectively transmit several megawatts of continuously radiated power across the field of regard. A surveillance array located at the observatory is used to collect the RF energy reflected off the RSOs, which is conditioned and digitised independently, allowing simultaneous receive beams to be formed during the processing stage.
This abundance of existing energy from geographically diverse sources and the ability to form simultaneous beams enable persistent wide field of view coverage, thus the ability to ‘see everywhere all the time’. Passive radars, such as the MAVERICK system, can also operate continuously, regardless of the time of day or weather conditions, allowing observations to be conducted uninterrupted. It is these capabilities that make passive radar well suited to launch detection, supporting launch and early orbit phase (LEOP) activities, and monitoring for object re-entry.
Safe and efficient launch operations require Launch Collision Avoidance (LCOLA) assessments to be timely, reliable, and based on frequently updated SSA data. The continued growth of RSOs in low earth orbit (LEO) makes the collection of timely SSA data for this assessment a formidable operation. Further, cued SSA sensor operation can be a limitation when the ephemeris of the targeted RSO is not sufficiently known, such as following a significant manoeuvre or RSO re-entry.
To fill this SSA gap Silentium Defence has begun operations utilising the search capabilities afforded by passive radar. The benefits of this capability will be explained firstly in terms of a constrained search function– utilising any available information on the RSO’s orbit – and then for a fully un-cued wide area search function.
In this presentation, we will give an overview of recent updates to the Silentium MAVERICK S-series system at the Oculus observatory including the new search capabilities. Several use cases of passive radar for launch and re-entry support will be explored utilising a unique selection of data obtained from the MAVERICK radar.
Date of Conference: September 17-20, 2024
Track: SDA Systems & Instrumentation