Speaker
Description
With the increase of anthropogenic space objects, space traffic management is becoming more crucial to space sustainability. In line with ESA’s Zeros Debris approach, in-orbit collision avoidance (COLA) has become an integral part of almost every Low Earth Orbit mission. However, it is also important to consider in the maneuver decision the socio-economic impact of those satellites on applications on Earth. Thus, COLA-EVDT, a decision support system for in-orbit collision avoidance using the Environment-Vulnerability-Decision-Technology (EVDT) framework, has been developed to address that topic. The EVDT framework, developed by the Space Enabled Research Group at MIT, captures environmental factors, human vulnerability, human decision making and data providing technologies to form a decision supporting system architecture framework. EVDT has already been used to address challenges such as mangrove conservation in Brazil and flood resilience in Indonesia. Moreover, COLA-EVDT represents the first application of EVDT in space. Currently, there is not enough quantitative studies on the implications of potential space policies, such as research on the number of maneuvers performed by each spacecraft owner/operator resulting from such policies. In this paper, improvements are brought to COLA-EVDT that aim to simulate scenarios with specific space policies, in order to understand their implications. More specifically, the scenario of having a policy that dictates a common probability of collision and time of maneuver threshold for maneuver decisions for all spacecraft owner/operators is assessed, and its influence on the resulting number of maneuvers is examined. The Vulnerability model is modified such as to have an ordinal ranking between the primary and secondary objects of a given conjunction. The ranking considers spacecraft hardware value and socio-economic impact. The paper explores how a decision on who maneuvers based on that ranking influences the maneuver frequency of each party as well as the sensitivity of that frequency with respect to the weighting of the socio-economic factors on the maneuver decision.
