Large-Scale Simulation of a Process for Cataloging Small Orbital Debris
Abstract
We demonstrate a methodology for establishing orbits for the abundant, un-catalogued, yet dangerous, small orbital debris that will become observable with planned improvements to the Space Fence. Although roughly 15,000 orbital objects are present in the SSN catalog, it is believed that at least 200,000 objects that are massive enough to cause significant damage are in Earth orbit. With improvements to the Space Fence, LEO debris down to 5 cm in size may become observable. The additional hundreds of thousands of observations a day of mostly un-catalogued objects will present a significant data processing challenge. Of particular concern are the large numbers of observations that are uncorrelated either to a known object or to a single object. To deal with the large-scale uncorrelated track (UCT) problem, we have ported the Covariance-Based Track Algorithm (CBTA) into the supercomputer-based Testbed Environment for Space Situational Awareness (TESSA) in order to perform simulations at scale. CBTA bins UCTs for which initial orbits and initial covariance matrices could be determined back to a common epoch and then uses a statistical measure to see if they correlate given the state vectors and covariance matrices at that common time. If they do, the observations from the two tracks are combined and orbit determination (OD) is used to attempt to fit an orbit to the combined tracks. If OD converges, a new UCT hypothesis is created and the state and covariance of that hypothesis is saved with the other pre-existing UCTs. If a certain number of tracks are successfully combined then they are used to create a new catalog object. Old UCTs are weeded out of the pool of hypotheses when they become obsolete, or when at least some of the observations are used to create a new catalog object.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA531774
Entities
People
- Alex Pertica
- Ben Fasenfest
- Chris Sahol
- David Jefferson
- Don Phillion
- H. Keo Springer
- Keric Hill
- Matt Horsley
- Scot Olivier
- Wim De Vries
Organizations
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory