Predicting MUOS Satellites' Radio Noise in ANITA-IV Recordings
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Date
2025-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) was a long-duration balloon experiment looking to detect Askaryan radio emission coming from ultrahigh energy neutrinos interacting with the Antarctic ice. Its fourth flight, ANITA-IV, took place in December 2016. The payload’s antenna band overlaps with parts of the frequency range of the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS). MUOS is a satellite communications system made up of five Navy satellites. When a satellite is in the payload’s field of view, its continuous wave signal is picked up as noise. The noise triggers signal recording where there is no interesting signal and could possibly overshadow real events. To prevent either issue from majorly affecting the recording of data, the specific frequency band must be filtered for certain sectors at certain times. To effectively determine when to block what, it is important to have a way of telling where the satellites are with respect to the payload. In the following, I describe a method of determining the satellites’ positions relative to the payload’s sectors using Two Line Elements of the satellites and positional data of the payload. Using this method, noise could be identified in the past ANITA-IV recordings. Additionally, it could be used in real-time during the upcoming flight of the Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations to determine when to apply filters.
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Keywords
UHE neutrinos, Mobile User Objective System, Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, Radio Noise, Coordinate Transformation