RT Journal Article
T1 Early cataloguing of fragments from break-up events
A1 Pastor Rodríguez, Alejandro
A1 Siminski, J.
A1 Escribano Blázquez, Guillermo
A1 Sanjurjo Rivo, Manuel
A1 Escobar, D.
AB Break-up events represent the dominant source of objects in space catalogues, surpassing half of the overall population. These not so uncommon events include explosions, collisions or anomalous events resulting in fragmentations and their number is estimated to be higher than 630. The early cataloguing of the fragments generated during these events poses a complex challenge for space objects catalogue build-up and maintenance processes. The provision of Space Surveillance and Tracking products and services during the few first days after a break-up event can be crucial to avoid collisions between the fragments and other space objects, particularly in highly congested regimes, such as Low Earth Orbit. In this regard, reducing the time required to accurately estimate the trajectories of the fragments may enable the execution of collision avoidance manoeuvres, in the case of operational space objects with manoeuvre capabilities, and analyse potential collision cascade events, which may endanger the space environment. This paper studies the whole cataloguing process after a break-up event, starting from a catalogue with no fragments from the fragmentation under-analysis, and until a well-established orbit is obtained for all fragments, using a ground-based sensor network. First, the observations enter a multi-sensor multi-target track-to-track association algorithm in charge of grouping observations belonging to the same objects. To resolve the ambiguity, particularly shortly after the event, hypotheses about tracks belonging to the same fragment are generated, scored, pruned, and promoted, only when there is enough confidence, leading to the initialisation of new objects in the catalogue. As soon as the catalogue is populated, a track-to-orbit correlation algorithm is responsible for the correlation of observations and already catalogued orbits. This alleviates the track-to-track association and enables the update of the orbital estimates, required for maintaining the catalogue.
PB Elsevier B.V.
SN 0273-1177
YR 2023
FD 2023-05-15
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/38952
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/38952
LA eng
NO This work was conducted during the research stay of A. Pastor in the ESA Space Debris Office at ESOC in Darmstadt. The corresponding author greatly appreciates the warm welcome, interest and support of the whole team.This project has received funding from the ”Comunidad de Madrid” under ”Ayudas destinadas a la realización de doctorados industriales” program (project IND2017/TIC7700).
DS e-Archivo
RD 18 jul. 2024