WARDEN - W-band Advanced Radar for Debris Early Notification

The understanding of the debris situation will be improved by the determination of the size, shape mass and attitude of orbiting objects for the assessment of the flux and collision rates and by the analysis of fragmentation laws after explosions or collisions of space objects. On the basis of national industrial technological know-how, the Italian Space Agency (ASI) has founded a pre-feasibility study for monitoring small space debris directly in orbit as an experimental mission on-board of International Space Station (ISS) by using an advanced millimetre wave radar sensor. The proposed experiment, described in this paper, offers several opportunities both in technological field (possibility to on-orbit qualifying of millimetre waves system and critical components) and in scientific field (completion of catalogue of centimetre and sub-centimetre space debris). It is aimed to validate the concept of future stand-alone on-orbit space based radar devoted to the detection of very small debris population.