# ATLAS: Latest Advancements and First Observations
## 5 Conclusions and Future Work  
After 4 years of development, testing, and validation, the ATLAS system has successfully achieved its first uncooperative observations of space objects. These results were only possible due to the efforts invested in creating an adequate observation strategy, implementing calibration techniques, and exploring the capabilities of the system in terms of baseband waveform generation and processing. As of now, ATLAS is evolving to be not only a radar system but a fully-fledged SST ground station with the capacity for orbit prediction, schedule generation, and maintenance of an internal catalog. ATLAS is still a work in progress that is moving closer to being used in an operational scenario. Ongoing and future work comprises the following:  
* Obtain more observations of well-known objects at different ranges and RCSs to obtain a better estimate of the radar's performance;
* Compare range and range-rate measurements with precise ephemeris to correct unaccounted bias terms;  
Figure 13: SNR dependence on the range for different RCSs. The theoretical curves (solid lines) were adjusted using the ISS observations to obtain a better estimate of the performance of ATLAS in real scenarios (dashed lines). * Increase the probability of detection by designing more sophisticated detectors. This includes exploring subspace detector design [40; 41], multi-stage adaptive detectors [42; 43], and machine learning-based detectors [44; 45];
* Address ambiguous Doppler velocity extraction using multiple PRFs [46; 47];
* Increase the peak power, bandwidth, and PRF of the system to increase the SNR, range resolution, and Doppler resolution. Conceptualization, J.P., M.B. and P.M.; methodology J.P., M.B. and P.M.; software, J.P.; validation, M.B., P.M. and B.C. ; formal analysis, J.P., M.B., P.M. and B.C. ; investigation, J.P., M.B., P.M. and B.C. ; resources, J.P.; data curation, J.P. and B.C. ; writing--original draft preparation, J.P.; writing--review and editing, M.B., P.M., B.C., D.B. and M.F. ; visualization, J.P.; supervision, P.M. and M.B. ; project administration, D.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. This work was supported by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT), Ph.D. grant No. 2022.12341.BDANA. Data Availability Statement:Data were obtained from the Portuguese Ministry of Defense and are available from the corresponding author with the permission of the Portuguese Ministry of Defense. The team acknowledges the European Commission's Horizon 2020 Programme under the Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) grant agreement 2-3 SST2018-20. Additionally, the team acknowledges LC Technologies for their technical developments in close collaboration with Instituto de Telecomunicacoes. We also acknowledge the support from the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) through the Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Programme (COMPETE 2020) of the Portugal 2020 framework (Project SmartGlow with No. 069733 (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-069733)). The team further acknowledges the support from the ENGAGE-SKA Research Infrastructure, Ref. POCI-01-0145-FEDER-022217, funded by COMPETE 2020 and FCT, Portugal. IT team members acknowledge the support from Projecto Lab. Associado UID/EEA/50008/2019. Finally, the team acknowledges the Portuguese Ministry of Defense for allowing the usage and dissemination of the results. Authors [PERSON] and B.C. are employed by ATLAR Innovation. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The following abbreviations are used in this manuscript: