Resolve pulse-to-pulse Doppler phase aliases throughout the catalogue

Develop and apply a robust pulse-to-pulse Doppler estimator that automatically rejects incorrect velocity sidebands and resolves phase aliases for the PANSY meteor head-echo catalogue.

Background

The experimental pulse-to-pulse phase method substantially reduces Doppler uncertainty and can improve dynamic-mass constraints, but the 8 ms sampling interval produces discrete velocity and acceleration ambiguities. Incorrect phase branches appear as sidebands separated by approximately 400 m s1.

The current procedure usually resolves the ambiguity using trajectory and likelihood constraints, but does not do so reliably for every event. Automatic and robust sideband rejection is therefore required before the method can become a production-quality Doppler and mass-estimation tool.

References

The ambiguity is usually resolved by the trajectory and local likelihood constraints, but not always. Pulse-to-pulse phase progression therefore has the potential to substantially improve dynamic trajectory fitting, but robust side-band rejection must be solved before it can be used as a high-quality Doppler estimator throughout the catalogue.

— The PANSY Meteor Head-echo Orbit Catalogue: Continuous Antarctic Radar Observations of Southern Meteoroid Streams  (2608.17589 - Vierinen et al., 18 Aug 2026) in Section 5.4, Pulse-to-pulse Doppler tests for mass constraints