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Space, as any other ecosystem, has a finite capacity. The continuous growth of space activities, due to our increasing reliance on services from Space, the privatisation of the space market and the lower cost of deploying smaller and distributed missions in orbit, is from one side improving human-life quality and, however, it is also contributing to overloading this delicate system. International discussion is ongoing at the Inter Agency Debris Coordination Committee and at COPUOS on how to measure the overall capacity of the space environment and assess the impact that individual missions have on it.
The “Space capacity allocation for the sustainability of space activities” workshop will be held in Politecnico di Milano (Italy) on 6-8 June 2023, in Piazza Leonardo Campus.
The workshop is organised by Politecnico di Milano, the European Space Agency Space and the Italian Centre of Research (CNR). The workshop is sponsored by the GREEN SPECIES project funded by the European Research Council lead by Politecnico di Milano and co-sponsored by Secure World Foundation.
This workshop is open to all researchers, space operators and regulators working in the space debris field. The aim is not only to present current advances in research on space capacity modelling and management, but above all to offer a constructive and interdisciplinary framework to discuss and work collaboratively to advance the discussion on space sustainability and space capacity management.
In this view, the following topics will be addressed and discussed during the workshop:
As outcome of the workshop, a special issue of a journal might be initiated with invited publications. In addition, a report and statement of the outcome to be shared with the outcome of the discussion will be prepared.
The workshop will be organised in presence with some parts in hybrid (i.e., in-person and remote) format, with presentations by participants alternating with working sessions and discussions.
For organisational aspects and to make discussions in working groups more interactive, only participants in-person may take part in them.
Some abstracts presentations will be accepted for remote, but priority will be given to in-person presentations.
On the 9th of June, Politecnico di Milano will also organise the second edition of the “Space Debris Day” for university students. If you want to prolong your stay to the 9th June and act as testimonial and presenter for this initiative, we would be very honoured!
Our society’s growing reliance on space services is on the one hand a precious resource for the space field, but on the other it is contributing to the overpopulation of some orbital regions around the Earth. Over the last ten years, the miniaturisation of space assets has played a fundamental role, massively decreasing launch costs and, thus, enhancing the privatisation of the space sector. As a result, the number of satellites launched into space every year has increased from a few tens in 2011 to nearly two thousand in 2021, with communication satellites of large constellations dominating the market. In this scenario, estimating the long-term effect of new traffic trends and constellations on the space debris environment is crucial for establishing remediation and mitigation measures that can counteract this growth.
To this aim, this work adopts a novel long-term debris environment propagator based on the Starling2.0 model developed at Politecnico di Milano, to predict the contribution of large constellations on the evolution of the number and distribution of space debris in low-Earth orbit. The proposed space debris model classifies the objects into payload, rocket bodies, mission related objects and constellations, with each constellation treated as a separate species. This division guarantees an individual definition of the mission profile, in terms of lifetime, post-mission disposal rate, duration, and strategy, and allows to investigate the dependency of each species’ environmental impact on such control parameters. Instead, a continuum approach is adopted for the characterisation of the fragments cloud, whose density distribution over the phase space of orbital elements is propagated in time through the continuity equation. This probabilistic propagation method makes the required computational time independent of the lowest fragments size considered, allowing for the potential extension of this study to any objects dimension. Two fragments source terms are here considered: intact objects explosion and accidental fragments-intact object collision, whose resulting fragmentation debris clouds are included in the model as a feedback effect. This work will present the results of many simulation scenarios, where the input intact objects population, as well as the post-mission disposal strategy, are varied to assess the impact of large constellations, depending on these control parameters.