Estimation of the Characteristics of a Promising Orbital Lidar for Space Debris Monitoring

摘要

A preliminary study aimed at estimating the potential of a promising orbital lidar for space debris monitoring has been performed. Estimates of the space debris detection range under different observation conditions with different technical characteristics of lidar have been calculated. It is shown that the detection range for space debris fragments with sizes of 1 to 10 cm in the wavelength range near 0.5 μm depends strongly on the observation conditions, which are determined by the additive-noise level. It is concluded that a promising orbital lidar should contain a laser emitter with a power of several hundreds of watts and a receiving telescope about 0.5 to 1m in diameter. The possibility of using an orbital lidar for recognizing space debris is estimated. It is shown that a recognition probability exceeding 0.8 can be attained for a space debris image containing several tens of pixels and a signal-to-noise ratio above 10.