Presentation Night – Space Junk and the role of Amateur Radio

Space Junk and the role Amateur Radio can play

Since the dawn of the space race, humanity’s ventures into space have relied heavily on radio technologies and methods. As the infrastructure in space has changed, so too has the RF environment and the infrastructure needed to support activity in space—from satellite stationkeeping and collision avoidance, to space weather monitoring, to mission control for automated landers and probes. Mars Buttfield-Addison is a computer scientist working with radio telescopes at the University of Tasmania, where she is involved in the adaptation of radio telescopes for increasingly demanding and atypical tasks. In this talk, she will discuss some of the RF infrastructure and processes in use in the space industry today, what Tasmania does to contribute, and where these means fall short globally—creating opportunities for coordinated campaigns of smaller instruments to contribute.