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0 pointsTommstein2y ago0 comments

> Also, if it's not big enough to monitor it can disappear. Radar makes it hard to track anything that's not huge and actively transmitting.

I don't know about that:

"Since 1990, the Goldstone Orbital Debris Radar has collected orbital debris data for debris as small as about 2 mm in LEO for the NASA ODPO. . . . . The Goldstone Orbital Debris Radar is an extremely sensitive sensor capable of detecting a 3-mm metallic sphere at 1000 km, which makes it an incredibly useful tool in the characterization of the sub-centimeter-sized debris population." - https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/measurements/radar.html

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bagels2y ago

Mechanical parabolic dish is severely limited in the number of objects that can be tracked per unit of time. The object has to pass through the narrow beam.

There's a trade-off between sensitivity and number of objects you can track, and mechanical steering is inferior to phased arrays for rapidly changing targets.

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0 pointsTommstein2y ago0 comments

> Also, if it's not big enough to monitor it can disappear. Radar makes it hard to track anything that's not huge and actively transmitting.

I don't know about that:

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bagels2y ago

Mechanical parabolic dish is severely limited in the number of objects that can be tracked per unit of time. The object has to pass through the narrow beam.

There's a trade-off between sensitivity and number of objects you can track, and mechanical steering is inferior to phased arrays for rapidly changing targets.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse