Commercially Responsive Precise Tracking of Satellites and Debris in Low-Earth Orbit

LeoLabs’ mission is to secure commercial operations in low Earth orbit (LEO) by deploying a worldwide network of phased-array radars coupled with a near-realtime data analytics service.As the LEO ecosystem around our planet... [ view full abstract ]

LeoLabs’ mission is to secure commercial operations in low Earth orbit (LEO) by deploying a worldwide network of phased-array radars coupled with a near-realtime data analytics service.

As the LEO ecosystem around our planet becomes more congested, the risk of collision rises, and the need to map the orbits of spacecraft, satellites, and space debris grows with every launch. Meanwhile, new generations of inexpensive commercial spacecraft, such as smallsats and cubesats, are lowering the barrier to LEO further, permitting the economical deployment of large constellations.

At present, the LeoLabs network consists of two radars based on radar technology developed at SRI International for ionospheric sensing. These currently track over 10,000 objects as small as 10 cm in size. In this talk we describe the radar network, heritage, and technology, as well as plans to grow the service to track hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris as small as 2 cm by 2018.