2018/05/23 by Stefano Cicalò, Cicalò, Stefano, Stijn Lemmens +1
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astro and Planetary Science #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences #Ionosphere and magnetosphere dynamics #Space Satellite Systems and Control
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1805.09171
openalex publication_date 2018/05/23 · openalex created_date 2022/08/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The problem of the re-entry predictions of GOCE has been deeply investigated\nin the literature, due to the large amount of data, mainly radar and GPS,\navailable until re-entry. The accurate GPS and attitude measurements are used\nto compute a precise reference orbit for the three weeks of decay, and to\nextrapolate the ballistic coefficient evolution of the object. In previous\nworks, the capabilities of radar-based solutions for the re-entry predictions\nof GOCE and of similar objects were investigated, focusing on the german TIRA\nradar. In this work we have performed additional analysis, focusing on the\nnorthern european radar EISCAT-UHF, located in Troms o, Norway. This sensor,\nconceived for atmospheric studies, has recently been considered for space\ndebris applications. Due to its limited tracking capabilities, we are\ninterested in testing its effectiveness in supporting re-entry predictions. We\nhave simulated reliable re-entry prediction scenarios, with different\navailability of data from EISCAT and TIRA. The main conclusion is that,\nprovided a suitable amount of observations, EISCAT-based re-entry predictions\nare comparable to TIRA-based, but also to GPS and TLE-based, corresponding\nones. In general, EISCAT is not able to determine an orbit with the same\naccuracy of TIRA, but the results are equivalent in terms of re-entry\npredictions, if we consider the relevant parameters involved and their effects\non the re-entry time. What is very important is the difficulty in predicting\natmospheric and attitude significant variations in between the current epoch\nand the actual re-entry. Thus, it is not easy to keep the accuracy of\npredictions much lower than 10% of the residual lifetime, apart from cases with\nconstant area to mass ratio, and low atmospheric variations with respect to the\nmodels. An experiment with real data is presented for the object 2012-006K,\nwith consistent results.\n