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these frequencies a space-based radio telescope needs to be distance to Earth, relative drift rates of the satellites inuenc-
built, due to the earlier described reasons: blocking and dis- ing both the maximum correlation integration times and the
turbance by the ionosphere and the strong RFI on Earth. rate at which the aperture plane is sampled. And of course the
Recent developments in space industry have motivated level of expected RFI is an important factor, both man-made
engineers and scientists to reconsider the idea of a low- and from celestial origins. Most of the astronomical signals of
frequency radio telescope in space. The evolution and on- interest are very week, often buried beneath the instantaneous
going miniaturisation of technology for example, have led to noise. This would allow coding of the pre-correlation signals
the emergence of new very small spacecraft (nano-satellites) with a limited number of bits, but only if the RFI levels would
capable of performing simple missions in space. Recent ad- be low.
vances in communications also bear a promise for increased
intersatellite communication bandwidth for relatively low
power conditions. Several space-based observations at low 3. EXPECTED RFI
frequency were done (by the Radio-Astronomy-Explorer-2
satellite in the seventies, and also by SELENE, Cassini, Wind To determine the amount of expected RFI on various loca-
STEREO), but are very limited in resolution and sensitivity tions, the rst step is to identify possible sources of RFI [18].
since it was a single antenna instrument [10]. The most obvious source of RFI in any location in space is
In the ESA DARIS (Distributed Antennas for Radio as- man-made interference on Earth. On Earth the spectrum is
tronomy In Space) project [16, 15] a study on the possibili- heavily in use for various communication applications. Be-
ties of conducting low-frequency observations with multiple sides that, the propagation properties of low frequencies are
small satellites was carried out. A scenario with eight slave such that the attenuation of the signals is very low and there-
spacecraft and a central spacecraft was proposed, in which the fore the RFI of man-made interference is high.
nodes will do the sensing part while the mothership will have The second form of expected RFI is lightning. It is well
additional processing and communication tasks. One of the known that terrestrial lightning generates radio signals. It was
conclusions of the study was that technology has reached a the research on lightning in transatlantic radio communication
level where this type of scenario is realistic and can be imple- that makes the discovery of radio astronomy in the rst place.
mented with COTS components. However, having a central This phenomenon is not restricted to Earth and many observa-
spacecraft will increase the risk of failure of the system. tions show that lightning appears also on other solar planets.
A sequel of DARIS, the OLFAR (Orbiting Low Fre- The Voyager 1 and 2 discovered radio emission of lightning
quency Antennas for Radio Astronomy) project, focused on a on Saturn and Uranus. Lightning of Jupiter will be difcult
radio telescope in space for the 0.3 30 MHz domain based to detect from Earth since the emission of a frequency around
on a completely distributed system without a central process- 20 MHz will be below the ionospheric cutoff frequency. But
ing node [6, 7, 2]. A swarm of 50 or more nano-satellites in space the signals of lightning of our solar planets will be
orbiting faraway from terrestrial RFI is to be used to sense detectable.
and sample the cosmic noise, process the information by In case a planet has a strong magnetic eld, there is a
means of distributed correlation, and send the processed data possibility that solar winds or the planets satellites interact
to a base station on Earth. That means that each member of with the magnetosphere. This generates intense radio waves
the swarm will have to full three main tasksradio observa- at low frequencies. The mechanism has been identied as the
tion, data distribution and processing, and downlinking. With cyclotron-maser instability, a non-thermal, coherent emission
current-day technologies, an instantaneous radio frequency mechanism. The radiation has a frequency of between 30 kHz
bandwidth of about 1 MHz would be feasible, and larger and 1 MHz and a total power of between about 1 million and
bandwidth capabilities are expected in the coming decade. 10 million watts. The radiation is absorbed by the ionosphere
The question arises, where to place a low frequency ra- and therefore can only be measured outside the Earth.
dio telescope in space. Several suggestion have already been The fourth effect of expected RFI is Quasi Thermal Noise
made, including: (QTN). QTN is radio noise induced by solar uv radiation im-
Lunar orbit (approx. 384.000 km from Earth) pinging on the antennas.
The last one is EMI of the own spacecraft. Although this
Earth leading/trailing orbits (approx. 5.000.000 km
can be minimised as much as possible in the design, some-
from Earth)
times small residuals of RFI remain. The good thing about
Sun-Earth L2 (approx. 1.500.000 km from Earth) this type of RFI is that it is to some extent predictable. Cali-
bration is possible, although this will impact the overall sen-
Earth-Moon L2 (approx. 60.000 km from the Moon,
sitivity. Mitigation approaches include using differential am-
makes approx. 444.000 km from Earth)
pliers; spatial ltering is also a possibility but that would
The location decision is depending on a number of pa- reduce the number of degrees of freedom in the signal pro-
rameters. For example downlink bandwidth depending on the cessing steps, and would not be optimal.
Interference produced at the surface of the Earth, arti- 4.2. RAE2 data
cial radio transmissions and lightning, are effectively blocked
by the Moon. This makes the far side of the Moon an inter- RAE-2 Lunar orbit data show that man-made RFI from Earth
esting place for a radio telescope for low frequencies. Be- is visible with powers of about 10 to 20 dB above the galactic
low 3 MHz, these signals are already attenuated a lot by the background, for frequencies between 250 kHz and 13.1 MHz
ionosphere of the Earth, and above 3 MHz the attenuation [9][1]. The frequency channel widths used are 20 kHz wide.
during ground wave propagation around the Moon is so high In [1] it is shown that at Earth day-night differences in emitted
that the surface produced RFI will not be observed behind the interference as seen from the RAE-2 lunar orbit ranges from
Moon. The Earth Auroral Kilometric Radiation (AKR, fre- about 40 dB at 40 kHz to about 20 dB at 4 MHz. The Earth
quencies 30kHz - 1MHz) is more troublesome because it is night time, having a more transparent ionosphere, is the more
not produced at the surface, but at an altitude of 1-3 times the noisy period. Using the same conversions as in the previous
radius of the Earth. This means that it does not have to prop- section, the predicted RFI levels based on the measurements
agate through the ionosphere to reach the Moon. These low of RAE-2 can be given for the various locations. This is pre-
frequencies are less attenuated by ground wave propagation. sented in able 1.
However, due to the very low conductivity of the Moon its
surface and the very rough terrain, the RFI produced by AKR 4.3. Waves RFI obervations
will still be much weaker than the Galactic Background Radio
Noise when there is no direct Line of Sight (LOS). However, Percentile plots of seven data sets from the Waves instrument
due to the high altitude of the AKR, there will be a smaller on the Wind space craft, more or less randomly chosen be-
area behind the Moon where there is no direct LOS to the tween 2002 and 2016, are plotted in Figure 1. Each data set
source, which reduces the amount of time where observations contains one minute time averages and sampled logarithmi-
can be executed during a Moon orbit. cally between 1.1 and 13.8 MHz. From each of these seven
datasets, the 0.99, 0.9 and 0.5 percentile spectra were com-
puted and plotted. The gure shows that the maximum in-
terference level is about 7 dB above the background. The
4. MEASURING RFI LEVELS Waves instrument is located in Earth L1. Extrapolated to lu-
nar orbit distances (about four times closed to Earth than Sun-
To be able to tell more about the levels of RFI on the various Earth L1) this would mean 10 log10 (42 ) = 12 dB more power,
locations, two possible options are possible: look at the obser- or about 19 dB above the background noise. As the L1 La-
vation of existing instruments and secondly use Earth based grangian point is at the day-side of Earth, the observed spectra
observations to extrapolate to the RFI situation in space. Ra- at the night-side of Earth would be about 20 dB higher, as is
dio Astronomy Explorer 1 and 2 and the Waves instrument of shown in [1]. This would mean that the maximum expected
the Wind spacecraft for example are known instruments. The man-made interference levels in the range 1-14 MHz would
data is available and can be used for interpretation. In the up- lie in the range 20 to 40 dB above the celestial background.
coming subsections measurements taken by several missions
will be briey described. 4.4. Terrestrial measurements
6. CONCLUSIONS
7. REFERENCES
5. DISCUSSION
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