EISCAT Svalbard Radar measures NorSat-1

Yesterday, I told you that the latest beam park measurement of space debris detected two clusters of small satellites. After talking with Lasse Clausen from UiO today, I figured out that Norway's first scientific satellite, Norsat-1, is one of the small satellites launched in one of these flocks. I is about 20x30x40 cm in size, which makes it a reasonably big target, which will also show up in the sidelobes of the radar. I did a little search, and figured out that Norsat-1 is indeed one of the objects that we detected in the beampark observation.

Detections of space debris at 5.1.2018 7:06 UTC. NORAD catalog numbers of objects are shown. Red dots are detections. The code for Norsat-1 is 42826U. It is one of the detections here. It has range residuals of 500 meters, and Doppler residuals less than 10 m/s.

Here's the same signal to noise ratio plot, without all the clutter. I've circled the echoes corresponding to Norsat-1.

Comments