Speaker
Dr
Carlos YANEZ
(GMV Innovating Solutions)
Description
One of the main missions of a Space Surveillance system is the detection and cataloguing of space objects having a size compatible with the detection constraints of its sensors. While radars are used to observe objects placed at Low Earth Orbits (LEO), and Telescopes to observe objects orbiting in Medium (MEO) and Geostationary Orbits (GEO), for objects orbiting in Highly Elliptical Orbits (HEO), both types of sensors are suited for observations. In particular, the passage through the perigee can be observed from radar stations, while in the high-altitude orbit portion telescopes are intended to be the source of observations. In this way, combining data derived from different type of sensor seems advantageous for tracking HEO objects.
BAS3E (Banc d’Analyse et de Simulation d’un Systeme de Surveillance de l’Espace) is a space surveillance system simulation bench that includes the “real world” simulation (objects and sensors) and the operational surveillance system (e.g. Cataloguing and catalogue maintenance, collision risk assessment, re-entry prediction and fragmentation detection). This tool enables the performance analysis of the surveillance network depending on its features, as well as the algorithms involved in the catalogue maintenance, analysis and planning systems. BAS3E is composed of different subsystems including:
- Observations simulation of surveillance network sensors: reference orbits generation, considered as “real” orbits, and the associated sensors observations generation.
- Catalogue maintenance system: sensors observations treatment and correlation, objects orbit determination, and objects database maintenance (the catalogue).
- Catalogue analysis system: orbits and covariances propagation, from catalogue objects; collision risk and reentry risk assessment using the propagated orbits; and fragmentation analysis and detection.
- Planning of sensor observations depending on previous analysis systems requests.
BAS3E makes use of parallel computing techniques, allowing, in a reasonable time effort, the simulation of thousands of space debris objects and the operation of a dedicated space surveillance network.
This paper describes an application using BAS3E, focused on the performance analysis of different space surveillance networks in the detection and cataloguing of a HEO population of objects. The use of BAS3E is described, including the concatenation of computation stages, the databases management and the persistence layers. Sensor networks considered within this study contain different combinations, in quantity and quality, of ground-based telescopes and radars. These sensor networks have been selected attending to criteria such as viable number of stations for a mid-term deployment and quality (measurement noise, observability constraints …) in line with already-operating sensors. This study tends to evaluate the advantages of fusing data from different sources (only optical measurements, or optical measurements along with radial distance and/or radial velocity data) concerning HEO orbit determination and, besides, conclusions are presented on the gain of incorporating additional sensors in a hypothetical space surveillance system ground network.
| Applicant type | First author |
|---|
Primary author
Dr
Carlos YANEZ
(GMV Innovating Solutions)
Co-authors
Mr
Alfredo ANTON
(GMV AD.)
Mr
Juan Carlos DOLADO
(CNES)
