Available projects – Solar terrestrial and atmospheric research (Kiruna)

Searching for meteorites using weather radars

There are several methods by which to detect meteorites or meteorite producing meteors using weather radars if the raw data is available. This is currently being done in the US and recently Swedish radars have been upgraded to allow for such searches. This project would examine if and how we could do this.

Skills: Data analysis, programming, physics
Education program: Physics major
Programming language: Left to personal choose

Contact person: Dr. Daniel Kastinen, daniel.kastinen@irf.se

Published in March 2025

Interactive Earth orbit dynamics playground (space safety)

(project work)

Develop a software where we can use Orekit to compare different orbits, propagators, propagator settings and play with settings to get intuitive feeling of orbital dynamics and propagators, as well as their advantages and limitations through visualizations.

Programming language: Java and Python

Contact person: Dr. Daniel Kastinen, daniel.kastinen@irf.se

Published in October 2023

Adaptive beam-forming and beam-spoiling

(master thesis)

A phased array radar can transmit signals in different directions by applying phase offsets to the transmitting units. Usually a simple plane phase offset is applied to direct the beam in a single direction with as high directivity as possible. However, it is possible to modify these phases so that e.g. certain regions of the sky receive minimal radiation while others receive maximal, or e.g. the transmitted radiation is spread over a larger area.

Implement the adaptive beam-forming and beam spoiling technique into the metecho library.
Use the techniques together with radar radiation pattern models in pyant to show that multi-target space debris tracking, wide-illumination meteor experiments, predictable hard target clutter minimization is possible.

Skills: Mathematics, radar technology, programming
Education program: Physics major
Programming language: C/C++ and Python

Contact person: Dr. Daniel Kastinen, daniel.kastinen@irf.se

Published in October 2023

Orbit determination testing and implementation (space safety)

(master thesis)

We have a package called odlab that we use to test and experiment with different orbit determination methods and to implement the suitable ones in data reduction pipelines.

Implement orbit determination using Orekit and make the implementation callable from odlab.
Evaluate StoneSoup and orbdetpy as orbit determination libraries, implement and test and compare them with the Orekit implementation.

Skills: Orbital dynamics, programming
Education program: Physics major/computer science
Programming language: Java and Python

Contact person: Dr. Daniel Kastinen, daniel.kastinen@irf.se

Published in October 2023