Speaker
Mr
Stijn Lemmens
(European Space Agency)
Description
Currently, there are about 17 000 tracked objects in Earth orbit, out of which approximately 7500 are expected to have a remaining orbital lifetime of less than 100 years. Out of those 7500, about 1250 have a mass of more than 1 kg, but the vast majority are smaller pieces of space debris.
Once an object in Earth orbit has reached the end of its operational life, or in case of a space debris object after its genesis, it enters into the re-entry prediction system of ESA’s Space Debris Office. This system automatically predicts the remaining orbit lifetime; In case of a short remaining orbit lifetime it automatically predicts the impact location, risk and associated uncertainties; In case of a high risk re-entry event it enables the in-depth analysis of the affected regions and atmospheric break-up of the object; And tools are available for post-event processing of the observational data. The results of this analysis chain are provided to the relevant actors, e.g. national alert centres or operators, either automatically or on-demand.
In this paper we present the status of the re-entry prediction system, and its orbit determination, orbit propagation, environment forecasting, and risk assessment methodologies related to the orbital lifetime, re-entry location, and atmospheric break-up predictions. Uncertainties depending on the orbit regions, object type, and step in the re-entry prediction system are derived and used to tune the service to provide the best possible results over the entire population. In the last step of the system, these automatically generated results are complemented with an operator review of the available data to provide re-entry and break-up prediction for individual objects, occasionally complemented by processing dedicated observations of the re-entry object. Post-mortem analyses, e.g. after a confirmed re-entry, are performed for selected objects in order to explain potential observations of the re-entry event and retrieved samples on-ground. The entire data collection is a relevant source which serves as input for break-up modelling tools, and improvement of the entire prediction service.
| Applicant type | First author |
|---|
Primary author
Mr
Stijn Lemmens
(European Space Agency)
Co-authors
Ankit Choudhary
(CGI)
Mr
Benjamin Bastida Virgili
(ESA/ESOC)
Mr
Frazer McLean
(CS GmbH)
Dr
Holger Krag
(European Space Agency)
Dr
Klaus Merz
(ESA)
Mr
Quirin Funke
(IMS Space Consultancy GmbH at ESA/ESOC)
Dr
Tim Flohrer
(ESA/ESOC)
Mr
Vitali Braun
(IMS Space Consultancy GmbH)
