Proc.

of the International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME)
7-8 October 2021, Mauritius

A new concept of bi-static radar for space debris

2021 International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME) | 978-1-6654-1262-9/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICECCME52200.2021.9590991

detection and monitoring

Germano Bianchi Giovanni Naldi Franco Fiocchi Pierluigi Di Lizia
National Institute of Astrophysics National Institute of Astrophysics National Institute of Astrophysics Politecnico di Milano
Bologna, Italy Bologna, Italy Bologna, Italy Milano, Italy
germano.bianchi@inaf.it giovanni.naldi@inaf.it franco.fiocchi@inaf.it pierluigi.dilizia@polimi.it

Claudio Bortolotti Andrea Mattana Andrea Maccaferri Alessio Magro University

National Institute of Astrophysics National Institute of Astrophysics National Institute of Astrophysics of Malta
Bologna, Italy Bologna, Italy Bologna, Italy Malta
claudio.bortolotti@inaf.it andrea.mattana@inaf.it andrea.maccaferri@inaf.it alessio.magro@um.edu.mt

Mauro Roma Marco Schiaffino Alessandro Cattani Denis Cutajar

National Institute of Astrophysics National Institute of Astrophysics National Institute of Astrophysics University of Malta
Bologna, Italy Bologna, Italy Bologna, Italy Malta
mauro.roma@inaf.it marco.schiaffino@inaf.it alessandro.cattani@inaf.it denis.cutajar@um.edu.mt

Giuseppe Pupillo Federico Perini Luca Facchini

National Institute of Astrophysics National Institute of Astrophysics Politecnico di Milano
Bologna, Italy Bologna, Italy Milano, Italy
giuseppe.pupillo@inaf.it federico.perini@inaf.it luca.facchini@polimi.it

Luca Lama Marco Morsiani Marco Felice Montaruli

National Institute of Astrophysics National Institute of Astrophysics Politecnico di Milano
Bologna, Italy Bologna, Italy Milano, Italy
luca.lama@inaf.it marco.morsiani@inaf.it marcofelice.montaruli@polimi.it

Abstract—The aim of this article is to present an innovative
radar for monitoring the space wastes in order to mitigate the
growing numbers of debris and the related risk for astronauts and
human space activities in general. The proposed architecture is a
bistatic radar named BIRALES (BIstatic Radar for LEo Surveys)
one of the sensors of the European Space Surveillance and
Tracking (EUSST) network. In this paper, an innovative concept
for space debris monitoring and detection in LEO (Low Earth
Orbit) is presented and some important results are shown.
Keywords—Space Debris, EUSST, bi-static radar, multibeam
I. INTRODUCTION
The number of manmade objects orbiting the Earth has
dramatically increased during the last years, posing a serious risk
for space-based activities. Most of the objects currently orbiting
the Earth are classified as “space debris”, that comprise inactive
satellites, discarded launch stages and fragments originated from
satellite breakups and collisions. An international effort is
currently being devoted to monitoring and predicting the debris
trajectories in order to avoid space collisions that could threaten
space missions, i.e. operative satellites or manned spacecraft.
Within this frame, an accurate estimation and propagation of
space objects trajectory is instrumental to avoiding in-orbit
collisions. In order to fulfil such an objective, accurate orbit
determination procedures shall be performed, by processing
measurements obtained on ground, which can be split among
optical, laser and radar sensors. Focusing on the last class, this
can be subdivided between tracking and survey sensors: the
former detects an object and moves its pointing along the
passage, in order to follow it; the latter instead keeps the pointing
fixed and just detects signals reflected by one or more objects
entering the receiver field of view (FoV).
To meet these requirements, the European Commission has
initiated the European SST (Space Surveillance and Tracking)
Support Framework initiative. Besides monitoring the space
environment, the European SST consortium is acting to provide
Europe with the capacity to process the data resulting from the
European network of sensors, with the aim of designing
Collision Avoidance Manoeuvres (CAM), predicting the RE-
entry (RE) of orbiting objects in Earth’s atmosphere, and
identifying the occurrence of satellites FraGmentations (FG).
The SST provisions combine the implementation of a newly
developed infrastructure, (including optical telescopes, radars
and laser stations) with the use and the upgrading of existing
European national sensors and operative centres. Among the
sensor selected for the network, the Italian radar ‘BIRALES’
(BIstatic RAdar for LEo Survey) has been chosen because of its
high sensitivity and its key position at the centre of the European
area [1][2][3][4].
II. BIRALES ARCHITECTURE
BIRALES is a bistatic radar [5] [6] composed of two distinct
antennas (figure 1), with a current baseline of about 580 km.

978-1-6654-1262-9/21/$31.00 ©2021 European Union

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Fig. 1. BIRALES Tx and Rx location.
The transmitting antenna is the Radio Frequency Transmitter
(RFT) of the Italian Joint Test Range of Salto di Quirra in
Sardinia, Italy (figure 2).
Fig. 2. BIRALES transmitting antenna (RFT).
It consists of a fully steerable 7 m dish equipped with a
transmitter able to supply 10 kW power in the frequency band
410-415 MHz. The transmitting antenna, with a beam of about
7.5 degrees, covers a field of view, which matches almost
perfectly to that of the receiving antenna.
The receiving antenna is a portion of the Northern Cross
Radio Telescope (figure 3), which is currently one of the largest
UHF-capable antenna in the world, being located at the
Medicina Radio Astronomical Station, near Bologna, in the
Northern Italy.
Fig. 3. BIRALES receiving antenna (Northern Cross radiotelescope).
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The portion dedicated to the BIRALES receiver is currently
composed of 8 parabolic cylindrical antennas of the North-
South (N-S) arm, with a total collecting area of about 1400
square meters; it allows to detect small objects with a size of 10
cm at 2000 km of slant range.
The BIRALES, with a FoV of 5.7° x 6.6°, is also used as a
test bed for new radar technologies and orbital determination
algorithms. The current 8-cylinder BIRALES configuration
includes 32 receivers (figure 4), which permit to populate the
FoV with many independent digitally-formed beams (figure 11).
Fig. 4. Sketch of 8 cylindrical parabolic reflectors; receivers (red dots) are
installed on the antenna focal line. Each receiver grouped 16 dipoles.
When an object transits inside the antenna field of view, the
beams are illuminated by the reflected radio waves. Thus, by
looking at the beam illumination sequence, it is possible to
estimate the angular path of the transiting object, with a higher
level of details with respect to a single-beam system used by
traditional radar. The information about the sequence of
illuminated beams allows discerning the trajectory of the object
on the plane of the sky.
In the coming months, an extension of the BIRALES field
of view up to 90° in the north-south direction is planned. This
extension will be achieved using all 64 available parabolic
cylindrical reflectors of the N-S arm and steering groups of them
towards different directions of the sky along the local meridian,
as pictorially drawn in figure 5.
Fig. 5. Block of 8 different multibeam to cover 90° of the north-south field of
view.
This configuration is possible because the cylindrical
reflectors can be moved mechanically independently from each
other (figure 6) and therefore they can point at different sky cloud of fragments after a satellite explosion and avoid collision
areas. between such very small objects with operative satellites. Table
I shows the characteristics that BIRALES will be able to achieve
after the upgrade.

TABLE I. BIRALES CHARACTERISTIC

Large FoV Small FoV
configuration configuration
Field of view 90° x 6.6° 5.7° x 6.6°
(N-S x E-W) (N-S x E-W)
Transmitting antenna gain 18.5 dBi 29 dBi
Receiving antenna gain 48.3 dBi 51.3 dBi
Fig. 6. Example of three cylindrical reflectors, of the Northern Cross Radio Max transmission power 10 kW 10 kW
Telescope, aimed at different elevations. Sensitivity (detectable >10 cm @ 2000 km >1 cm @ 2000 km
object size) of slant range of slant range
The widening of the field of view (figure 7) will significantly
improve the performance of the BIRALES as space surveillance In order to detect small objects, traditional radars need to
radar in terms of number of observable objects but not only that, spend much energy in transmission power; this limits their
as will be explained later. For this upgrade, many additional performance and use. Instead, thanks to the large receiving
antennas of the Northern Cross will be included in the BIRALES collecting area (more than 10,000 square meters), BIRALES is
receiving system (64 in total) and a dedicated transmitting able to detect few centimeters objects with considerable energy
antennas array will be installed closer to the receiving part and savings; this means a much higher ratio between performance
along the same meridian. and operating costs than any other radars. Furthermore, the
reduction of the transmitting power also yields a reduction of the
electromagnetic impact on the environment, classifying
BIRALES as a sort of “green radar”.
III. BIRALES SCHEMATIC BLOCK
BIRALES exploits an innovative concept based on two
different systems, working at the same time:
• Multibeam CW system
• Single beam pulse compression radar
Fig. 7. BIRALES FoV in the improved space surveillance configuration. In practice, the sensor couples two radar systems [7]. The
transmitting antenna emits simultaneously two different signals:
It is planned to upgrade the 64 cylindrical parabolic a “Chirp signal” for range measurement and a second
reflectors forming the whole N-S arm (figure 8), for a total of “Continuous Wave” for Doppler shift measurement and object
256 receivers and more than 10,000 m2 of collecting area. track reconstruction (figure 9). Overall, we simultaneously
obtain time profiles for range, angular position (azimuth and
elevation) and Doppler during the passage of the objects inside
the sensor field of view. This method guarantees also the
possibility to produce an autonomous Initial Orbital
Determination (IOD) for unknown objects that other radars
cannot perform.

Fig. 8. Circled in red, the N–S arm of the Northern Cross array, involved in
the upgrade.

The maximum sensitivity is reached when all the 64

parabolic cylindrical reflectors will be pointed in the same
direction. In this configuration, BIRALES will be able to detect
debris of few cm sizes in LEO. Obviously, such a configuration
implies a reduction of the FoV (from 90° x 6.6° down to 5.7° x
6.6°, the basic one) with respect to the case of the independent
pointing of the cylinders. This observational original mode will
Fig. 9. BIRALES schematic block.
be very effective in particular cases, for example to monitor the

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 BIRALES is completely autonomous: the received echoes
are immediately processed and the orbital parameters obtained
are compared against the parameters of catalogued objects
(through of a correlation software/algorithm) in order to check
whether the observed object is catalogued or not. If the observed
object is not classified, the measured orbital parameters are
uploaded into the SST European database and used, together
with the other sensors data, for collision avoidance,
fragmentation or re-entry services.
An overview of the radar processing system, together with
the main components making up the system are represented in
figure 10.
Fig. 10. A block diagram illustrating the main components of the BIRALES
processing system.
The receiving antenna signals chain is implemented with
Radio Frequency over Fibers (RFoF) technology by using single
wavelength TX-RX. The optical receivers convert the analog
signal to RF and then down convert the signal to baseband with
a frequency tunable local oscillator. A CASPER ROACH board
[8] equipped with a 40MSPS 64 input ADC digitized and
channelized the signals into a total of 256 coarse frequency
channels 78.125 kHz wide. Since the maximum Doppler Shift
corresponding to a radar space object is expected to be in the
order of a few tens of kHz, a single coarse channel is transmitted
to the workstation via UDP packets (User Datagram Protocol).
Setting the local oscillator to have the transmitter frequency at
the centre of a coarse frequency channel band provides a suitable
detection window for SST.
The specialised data processing software developed in this
work is installed. This software backend generates a number of
narrow beams electronically steered inside the instrument’s 5.7
by 6.6 degree FoV at -3dB. To do that, a calibration phase and a
subsequent combination of signals in phase and amplitude
(coming from 32 different receivers), allow to generate many
beams (pixels) and move these inside the antenna field of view.
In figure 11 it is shown the contour plot at -3dB of the power
pattern of 32 beams formed to cover the single element FoV.
This arrangement of the beams is referred to as the multi-pixel
or multibeam [9].
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Fig. 11. The multi-pixel configuration of the BIRALES radar. The large blue
ellipse shows the single element pattern at -3dB (field of view). The beams that
are affected by ambiguity due to grating lobes are highlighted in red.
IV. INITIAL ORBITAL DETERMINATION
Currently, initial orbit determination (IOD) is performed by
processing the data measured by the multiple beams of the
sensor. More specifically, measurements can be processed to
infer the illumination sequence of the beams and, hence, to
determine the angular track of the object while it crosses the FoV
of the sensor. However, as the spacing between each element is
longer than half wavelength in both E-W and N-S directions,
multiple grating lobes are present for all beams (red beams in
figure 11). This results in possible ambiguities, as it is difficult
to determine whether the illumination was due to the main lobes
or due to the grating lobes.
A dedicated (IOD) algorithm has been developed to tackle
this issue. The algorithm is divided in three phases [10]:
• Phase 1: the measured SNR profiles and the gain pattern of
the multibeam system are processed to find candidate beam
illumination sequences
• Phase 2: for each beam, all peaks in the SNR profile are
associated to the gain peak which is responsible for the
generation of the measurement and, after minimizing the
residuals between the predicted and measured SNR and SR
profiles, an estimate of the angular track is obtained.
• Phase 3: an optimization is performed to fit the orbital mean
state with the angular profile obtained in Phase 2 and the SR
and DS measurements.
Using the range measurement system working together with
the multibeam system and applying the above algorithm,
BIRALES can provide an orbital estimate of catalogued objects
and update their orbital state, or TLE (NORAD Two Line
Element), immediately. Compared to traditional radars,
BIRALES can thus provide an IOD during the first passage
(within its field of view) of an uncatalogued object with a
timeliness of few minutes. This feature allows the immediate
tasking of the other sensors of the network to track the detected
object, and to potentially update the catalog by minimizing the
risk of losing the object. The BIRALES accuracy obtained are:
• Angular accuracy = 10-3 deg
• Range accuracy = 50 m
 V. RESULTS
BIRALES was included in the list of sensors to be tasked to
monitor the uncontrolled re-entry of a stage of the Chinese CZ-
5B R/B/2021-035B launcher (NORAD ID 48275). From 3rd to
9th May 2021 (day of the re-entry), BIRALES made
measurements at every passage of the rocket over Italy and
provided fundamental contributions for national and European
safety. BIRALES updated the TLE and was the only European
radar able to detect the echo during the last passage of the rocket
over Europe, before its re-entry (figure 12).
The ellipses represent the receiving beams, whereas the intensity
of the measured signal is shown by the green background. As
can be deduced from the figure, beams are illuminated due to the
passage of the target either in the main or in the grating lobes.
The green line is the reconstructed angular track (trajectory)
obtained after the observed measure.

Fig. 14. Illumination of BIRALES beams during the passage of the stage of the
Chinese CZ-5B launcher (NORAD ID 48275) on May 5, 2021. Green line:
recostructed angular track using the observation data.

The slant range and Doppler shift of the received signal are
reported in figures 15 and 16 respectively.

Fig. 12. Very weak echo (circled in yellow) of the Chinese launcher, detected
during the last passage over the Europe: vertical axis the local time (UTC+2),
horizontal axis the normalized frequency and above the magnitude.

BIRALES estimated also the rotation period of the rocket,

measuring the variation vs time of the received SNR (Signal to
Noise Ratio). The rotation period is an important parameter to
know the type of impact with the atmosphere and therefore the
forecast of the re-entry window. Figure 13 shows the variation
of the SNR and the distant between two pecks (half rotation) was
about 2.25 sec; so the total period of rotation was about 4.5 sec.

Fig. 15. Range measured during the passage on 5th May 2021.

Fig. 13. Variation of the received SNR vs time during the 5th May 2021 passage
over Italy of the Chinese CZ-5B R/B/2021-035B launcher.

Using then the measurements of the track, doppler and slant

range, it was possible to update the object's orbit and the re-entry
window autonomously. For example, figures 14, 15 and 16
report the data gathered during the third observation on May 5,
2021. More specifically, figure 14 illustrates the beams
illuminated during the passage of the target in the sensor FoV. Fig. 16. Doppler measured during the passage on 5th May 2021.

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 The data (measured SNR per beam, slant range and Doppler
shift) have been used to perform an orbit determination
refinement process. By relying on the available TLE as initial
guess, the measured SNR and the slant range are used to refine
the track of the target in the sensor FoV (green line in figure 14).
Then, the obtained angular profiles are merged with the
measured slant range and Doppler shift to obtain the estimated
target state in terms of mean state and covariance matrix.
BIRALES was also involved in the fragmentation campaign
after the explosion of the tank of the upper stage of the Russian
Fregat rocket, happened on 8th May 2020. In this case, 6 tracks
of 6 unknown fragments were obtained by BIRALES and the
related TDMs were used to derive an estimation of the orbits of
the fragments, generating 6 TLEs, using the same method above
descripted for the re-entry. The data were used also in the
EUSST fragmentation report. In figure 17, 6 pictures illustrate
the 6 tracks obtained by BIRALES. More specifically, they
show the beams illuminated during the 6 transits of the 6
fragments in the sensor field of view and the angular profile of
the objects (red line). The matrix of the beams is the same of
figure 14.
Fig. 17. Tracks (red lines) of 6 fragments obtained by BIRALES during the
Russian Fregat rocket fragmentation campaign.
VI. CONCLUSION
The results show that the data provided by BIRALES can be
processed to estimate the orbital states with reasonable accuracy
with just a single passage of the object inside the field of view
of the sensor. The measurements collected by the BIRALES
system are very promising and comply with the design and
simulations. The application on a real case (re-entry of the
Chinese CZ-5B launcher or the explosion of the tank of the
upper stage of the Russian Fregat rocket) demonstrated the
effectiveness of the method, with good estimates of the re-entry
epoch and estimation of initial orbit of unknown objects.
Compared to the other radars, the large receiving collection
area allows the reduction of the transmission power and the
correlated electromagnetic impact on the environment, defining
BIRALES as a sort of “green radar”. The innovative concept to
combine, in the same system, two different signals (Chirp and
CW) guarantees a high level of accuracy. Future works [11] are
needed to increase the accuracy of measurements, to better
support the EUSST consortium, to build a spatial mapping of the
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objects in orbit, their classification and the exact identification
of their orbital characteristics.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The research activities described in this paper were
performed within the European Commission Framework
Programme H2020 and Copernicus “SST Space Surveillance
and Tracking” contracts N. 952852 (2-3SST2018-20) and N.
Nr. 299-G-GRO-COPE-19-11109 (1SST2018).
The authors acknowledge the support of the Italian Space
Agency through the grant agreement n. 2020-6-HH.0 (Detriti
Spaziali – Supporto alle attività IADC e SST 2019-2021).
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