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Table of Contents
ESA Summer of Code in Space 2013
Ideas
- Extend open-source toolkit which can be used as an substitute for closed source programs.
- Design and implement reliable algorithms for distinguishing different types of meteors.
Open-source meteor detection toolkit
Brief explanation
RMDS01A is a SDR receiver system designed for radio detection of meteor trails. It's advantage over other designs is a high performance software defined receiver and completely open-source design, which allows for advanced signal processing of radio images. The primary setup we used included non open-source software like Spectrumlab and HDSDR. We therefore developed completely open-source alternative.
Software for RMDS01A
Most important pieces of software are done. What is needed is to glue them together to cooperate flawlessly. For data acquisition we created program waterfall which reads input from SDR receiver and generates both FITS raw files and jpeg previews of these files for interactive visual inspection. For data synchronization with other nodes a set of bash scripts is used. Basic HTML5 interface was developed for live inspection of the received stream by many concurrent users over the internet.
Some screenshots from waterfall development:
Proposed projects:
- Difficulty: medium Importance: high. GUI to glue all above mentioned software together to provide solid user experience and ease of use.
- Difficulty: easy Importance: medium. Finish the HTML5 GUI for watching live streams, implement interactive elements (like LO frequency changing). Optimize for use with mobile devices (tablets, smartphones).
- Difficulty: hard Importance: medium. Implement algorithms for trajectory calculation of meteors. We will provide all algorithms to be implemented. Some very basic example: http://meteor.uwo.ca/research/radar/cmor_intro.html
- Difficulty: medium Importance: medium. Design and implement robust algorithms for processing the signal. The recommendations are to use one of: ROOT, GNU Octave, R.
Expected results
Single package which will be able to install software needed for viewing, detection, collection and processing of meteor signals.
Knowledge prerequisites
- Knowledge of programming languages necessary to implement the solution (C/C++ preferred for performance reasons).
- Ability to use/learn to use basic development tools (IDE, version control software, issue tracking systems).
- Ability to learn and use third-party libraries necessary to implement the solution (CFITSIO, libfft, libusb, …).
- Some math skills, at least has to know what Fourier transform does.
- Knowledge of most used data structures and algorithms, network and thread programming.
Test
We have several Radio Meteor Detection Stations spreaded around central Europe (in range of French GRAVES radar). These stations are GPS time synchonised with precision of 65 ns. The relevant signal will be reflected from meteor trails created by meteoroids which have speed in range
Contact
For futher information we strongly recomends to cantact project coordinator Jakub Kakona (kaklik@mlab.cz)
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