Mission Planning Tool for Space Debris Detection and Tracking with the MeerKAT Radar

Sustained human activity in Space has had the unfortunate consequence of creating space debris which accumulate in orbit. The rubble cloud which arose in the LEO regime poses a significant collision risk for spacecraft. Space surveillance is crucial to predict and prevent potential collisions in orbit. Surveillance and tracking are done with radar and telescope systems. A bistatic radar system featuring the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa as its receiver network has been proposed to perform space debris detection and tracking. This paper describes the Mission Planning Tool developed to perform sensor scheduling and predicting the performance of the proposed MeerKAT radar in terms of orbit determination accuracy. Numerical simulation results are shown to illustrate the operation of the proposed MeerKAT radar system for space target observation.