A Monitoring and Warning System for Close Geostationary Satellite Encounters
Abstract
In January 1997 Telstar 401 unexpectedly failed and began to oscillate indefinitely as a drifting satellite in the populous geopotential well between 97 to 113 degrees west longitude. This highlighted the fact that over 250 active satellites now exist in close proximity to a rich population of inactive (non-station kept) resident near-geosynchronous space objects. As a result of the Telstar 401 failure, MIT Lincoln Laboratory has joined a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with a number of geostationary satellite operators to monitor close encounters of their satellites with Telstar 401 and any other potentially threatening objects. As part of this agreement, a Geosynchronous Monitoring and Warning System is being developed to provide the commercial operators access to information pertaining to potential threats to their satellites. This system will maintain the relevant component of the Deep Space Catalogue using high accuracy special perturbations orbit determination and all available data. It will provide a 60-day ALERT of a potential encounter followed by necessary tasking of Lincoln Laboratory sensors that will improve the encounter prediction in order to give users a final confirmation WARNING of the encounter 15 days in advance. Accuracy of the computed orbits and encounter predictions is the key component. Motivation, design, implementation, and preliminary operational results will be presented.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 03, 2001
- Accession Number
- ADA400524
Entities
People
- E. W. Evans
- R. Clouser
- R. I. Abbot
- R. Sridharan
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology