Speaker
Description
Since the collapse of the ARECIBO radio telescope occurred on the 1st of December 2020 we are missing a powerful instrument that has been used for decades for Planetary Radar astronomy. Several institutions in US are trying to identify a viable solution to substitute the ARECIBO telescope. In Europe there are limited resources that could be used to perform this type of experiments. We would like to introduce some idea on how it could be possible to support the design of a European Planetary Radar by trading-off several radar architectures (single dish vs array configuration), different frequencies, different power amplifiers to cope with the Planetary Defence requirements and to take into account preliminary requirements for Cislunar SSA and Planetary Science. To give an example, few studies have demonstrated that, considering both CAPEX & OPEX costs a solution based on an array of smaller antennas will be cheaper than a new architecture based on a monolithic antenna. Graceful degradation will further help in improving the system availability. An array of 18m antennas equipped with 50 kW X-Band SSPA could be designed for such a scope. Nowadays, most observations are based on a network of Telescopes but there is a clear potential to improve these observations with the development of suitable ground-based radar network as well as advanced processing techniques to process data from multiple observations in the optical and RF domain.
