Speaker
Description
Since the dawn of the space exploration, the number of objects orbiting the Earth has exponentially grown. In the next decades, with the emergence of new actors and the commercial exploitation of the Space, a population in the order of several hundreds of thousands of satellites is foreseen, with circa 75% of them being active objects. In this scenario, manual on-ground decision-making processes are proving inadequate for ensuring timely and accurate responses to potential collision threats. The Space Traffic Management and increased on-board autonomy will become crucial to guarantee the in-orbit safety, mitigating the risk of collision between manoeuvrable satellites, the radiofrequency interference, or, more generally, coordinating the space activities from launch to mission disposal.
For effective Space Traffic Management, one foundational element is the Rules of the Road (RotR) in space. This presentation offers a technical perspective for different set of Rules of the Road, benchmarking them based on their success in resolving conjunctions between active objects, fairness and efficiency: High success rate in rules, capable of solving most of the typical conjunctions, is needed for enabling high automation in the decision-making process, thereby minimising the number of cases where individual bilateral discussions are needed; Fairness in rules is essential to gain acceptance from satellite operators; Efficient rules, which optimise the manoeuvres needed to reduce the conjunction risk, will lower the economic impact of Collision Avoidance Manoeuvres and contribute to a sustainable environment.
With respect to the on-board autonomy, GMV is developing on the last years several activities related to the collision assessment and avoidance autonomy, notably related to the ESA’s CREAM cornerstone in the Space Safety Programme, but also in activities enabling the technologies towards an increased on-board autonomy such as the OCAD and ACTIvA projects. In particular, the most advanced one of the activities, CREAM#3 has been devoted to the development of a coordination system allowing the data exchange between different actors, i.e. satellite operators, SSA providers, Catalogue Providers and STM authorities, with the ultimate goal of automating the decision-making process in a collision avoidance scenario. The platform counts on three levels process to resolve the scenario. The first and second level are sequential, the system initially passing through a filtering process applying the “Rules of the Road”. The rules are taking into account 5 major steps: Risk Level – checking that both satellites involved in the event are on ALERT; System Status – checking that both satellites involved in the event are functional; Bilateral Rules – checking if there are any bilateral agreements between the SatOps; CONOPS – checking if both satellites involved in the event are NOMINAL or performing a special manoeuvre; Resolution Deadline – checking that both satellites involved in the event have sufficient time to perform a CAM. In case the satellites are on the same level and no solution can be found, the second level is applied – Negotiation Process. This process is performed by using Multi-Agent System (MAS) algorithm for the computation of a performance index. Based on multiple parameters and weights as well as different negotiation strategies, the MAS agents negotiate finding the most efficient solution the specific case. The third level can be required at any point, the SatOps requesting a mediation process, where a STM Authority will have the final decision.
