Speaker
Dr
Klaus Merz
(ESA)
Description
ESA's Space Debris Office provides a service to support operational collision avoidance activities. This support currently covers ESA’s missions Cryosat-2, Sentinel-1A, Sentinel-2A, Sentinel-3A, and the constellation of Swarm-A/B/C in low-Earth orbit (LEO). The support process is provided to third party customers, too.
We provide an overview on tools used in the mission design phase and during the operational phase. In addition, we briefly introduce the process control and data handling in the ESA process.
During the mission design phase collision avoidance is studied. Here the focus is at the effect of warning thresholds on the risk reduction and manoeuvre rates. For such analysis ESA’s DRAMA tool suite with the module ARES is available.
During operations collision avoidance needs to address conjunction event detection, collision risk assessment, orbit determination, orbit and covariance propagation. ESA’s process based on the central tools CRASS and CORAM is implemented following a database-centric approach through a temporary local “mini-catalogue”. This catalogue is based on Conjunction Data messages (CDM) and own operational orbits. Each forecasted conjunction event is analysed in an automated way, returning the approach details and an estimate of the associated collision probability. A wide range of contemporary collision risk estimation algorithms with covariance scaling is supported. Identified high-risk conjunction events are further assessed and mission-specific processes are in place for decision-taking and manoeuvre recommendation. CORAM is able to assess optimised manoeuvres considering various constraints.
The database is also used as the backbone for a web-based tool (SCARF), which consists of a visualisation component and a collaboration tool that facilitates both, the status monitoring and task allocation within the support team, as well as the communication with the control team. The web-based solution optimally meets the needs for a concise and easy-to-use way to obtain a situation picture in very short time, and the support of third party missions not operated from ESOC.
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Primary authors
Dr
Klaus Merz
(ESA)
Dr
Tim Flohrer
(ESA/ESOC)
Co-authors
Mr
Benjamin Bastida Virgili
(ESA/ESOC)
Dr
Holger Krag
(ESA)
Mr
Quirin Funke
(IMS Space Consultancy GmbH at ESA/ESOC)
Mr
Stijn Lemmens
(European Space Agency)
Mr
Vitali Braun
(IMS Space Consultancy GmbH)
