Speaker
Description
Many of the tools used to track meteoroids entering the atmosphere can be adapted to characterise the highly complex re-entries of artificial spacecraft which are now entering the atmosphere multiple times per day; with each posing a risk to life and infrastructure both in the air and on the ground. In this talk I will show how seismic data enable us to reconstruct the trajectory of debris re-entries, estimate their speeds, and characterise their fragmentation. I will also discuss how seismic data can be used to track objects during their terminal phase of re-entry, when other methods such as optical and radar tracking struggle. Finally, I will discuss how we are using test events such as the Artemis II re-entry to calibrate our measurements, and new technologies such as distributed acoustic sensing to achieve better sensor coverage.