Nebula Public Library

At present, the largest part of the catalogued space debris population consists of fragments originating from accidental explosions of spacecraft and upper stages, but it is expected that hypervelocity collisions involving large objects could become the primary source of new debris in the mid-term future. In this context, understanding the physical processes involved in spacecraft collisions is crucial, because these big impacts are one of the key drivers of the long-term evolution of the amount of space debris.

This activity presents a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) simulator designed to assess the performance of bi-static SAR missions. It is a modular software able to simulate realistic SAR data (including injection of the system non-idealities), to estimate the SAR performance at radiometric and interferometric level. In order to ensure accurate measures of the bi-static performance, it simulates raw data exploiting a time-domain approach, without assumptions on the acquisition geometry. This feature makes the simulator a useful tool for the design of new SAR missions concepts.

The Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is a candidate ESA mission to the binary Near-Earth Asteroid (65803) Didymos. While its main objective is to demonstrate new technologies for future deep-space missions, AIM will also characterise for the first time a binary asteroid system, providing an understanding of its formation and of the origin of the Solar System.

The Biomass satellite is a polarimetric P-band (435 MHz) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in a dawn-dusk low-Earth orbit. Its principal objective is to measure biomass content and biomass change in all of Earth’s forests. The mission launch is envisaged around 2024, for a duration of five years.