The Design and Development of a GPU-accelerated Radar Simulator for Space Debris Monitoring

Abstract

The problem of space debris represents a major topic of concern in astronomy as the threat of space junk continues to grow, and the accuracy of its tracking is greatly restricted by the insufficiency and limitations of current surveillance sensors. This article presents the development of an open-source, high-performance, signal-level radar simulator to assist in modelling the detection and tracking of space debris from terrestrial radar stations, including multistatic installations where the transmitter and receiver may be separated by many kilometers. This tool is expected to aid astronomers and researchers in space situational awareness, supporting the modelling of radar interactions in this context and simulation-based exploration of radar designs for space surveillance. It makes use of an accelerated orbit propagation technique with measured two-line element datasets being used to define space debris objects. The software has been named the Space Object Astrodynamics and Radar Simulator – or SOARS – and both the transmitted and received signals generated by the application have been shown to agree with theoretical expectations. Additionally, SOARS is presently undergoing continued development, extension and optimization for heterogeneous computing platforms, enabling the use of the NVIDIA® Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) interface. Results have demonstrated promising speed-ups in simulation runtimes when using the CUDA version of the application over the original sequential version, even on lower-end graphics processors. It is anticipated that the developed application will be used for the design and testing of radar sensors for space situational awareness applications, as well as for use in research, teaching and training environments.