  The increase in space debris is a threat to space assets, space
based-operations and led to a common effort to develop programs for dealing
with this increase. As part of the Portuguese Space Surveillance and Tracking
(SST) project, led by the Portuguese Ministry of Defense (MoD), the Instituto
de Telecomunica\c{c}\~oes (IT) is developing rAdio TeLescope pAmpilhosa Serra
(ATLAS), a new monostatic radar tracking sensor located at the Pampilhosa da
Serra Space Observatory (ErPoB), Portugal. The system operates at 5.56 GHz and
aims to provide information on objects in low earth orbit (LEO) orbits, with
cross sections above 10 cm2 at 1000 km. ErPoB houses all the necessary
equipment to connect to the research and development team in IT-Aveiro and to
the European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU-SST) network through the
Portuguese SST-PT network and operation center. The ATLAS system features
digital waveform synthesis, power amplifiers using Gallium Nitride (GaN)
technology, fully digital signal processing and a highly modular architecture
that follows an Open Systems (OS) philosophy and uses Commercial-Off-The-Shelf
(COTS) technologies. ATLAS establishes a modern and versatile platform for fast
and easy development, research and innovation. The whole system (except antenna
and power amplifiers) was tested in a setup with a major reflector of
opportunity at a well defined range. The obtained range profiles show that the
target can be easily detected. This marks a major step on the functional
testing of the system and on getting closer to an operational system capable of
detecting objects in orbit.
