Satellite Safe Margin: Fast solutions for Conjunction Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces rapid methods for conjunction analysis in space debris management, enabling fast and accurate computation of safe margins between orbiting objects considering uncertainty, suitable for large-scale conjunction assessments.

Contribution

The work presents two novel fast algorithms for computing conjunction margins, one for centralized data and one for distributed data, improving speed and accuracy over existing methods.

Findings

Can process 15,000 conjunctions per minute with centralized data

Achieves approximately 490 conjunctions per minute with distributed data

Provides accurate distance and overlap assessments considering uncertainty

Abstract

The amount of debris in orbit has increased significantly over the years. With the recent growth of interest in space exploration, conjunction assessment has become a central issue. One important metric to evaluate conjunction risk is the miss distance. However, this metric does not intrinsically take into account uncertainty distributions. Some work has been developed to consider the uncertainty associated with the position of the orbiting objects, in particular, to know if these uncertainty distributions overlap (e.g., ellipsoids when considering Gaussian distributions). With this work, we present fast solutions to not only check if the ellipsoids overlap but to compute the distance between them, which we call margin. We present two fast solution methods for two different paradigms: when the best-known data from both objects can be centralized (e.g., debris-satellite conjunctions) and when the most precise covariances cannot be shared (conjunctions of satellites owned by different operators). Our methods are both accurate and fast, being able to process 15,000 conjunctions per minute with the centralized solution and approximately 490 conjunctions per minute with the distributed solution.