Speaker
Description
Despite its size, space is a limited common pool resource that humanity needs to learn to share to avoid falling into a future where access to it will become growingly challenging. To ease this problem, the majority of current approaches in space sustainability focus on the protection of already launched missions and the future evolution of the debris population in the near-Earth environment. Although this provides an understanding on the current and future trends and risk of space missions, these approaches do not answer other important questions regarding orbital capacity, fair access to space, or how to harmonize space operations from different missions. For this reason, this work focuses on Space Traffic Management, and more particularly, on identifying and studying slotting space architectures that guarantee the non-existence of conjunctions within spacecrafts compliant with the structure even under orbital perturbations. This provides safer and fairer access to space for future missions as well as several advantages both for short- and long-term space sustainability, including collision risk reduction, maximization of overall capacity and space usage, and facilitation of space situational awareness. In addition, slotting architectures have the potential of providing a common and clear policy mechanism to guarantee fair access to space for new satellites, allowing different missions to safely coexist close to each other, and enabling the safe operation of future space systems such as distributed space manufacturing, satellite servicing, satellite monitoring, space telecommunications, and in-space situational awareness. These slotting architectures can be designed, in addition, to adapt and evolve alongside improvements in technology, changes in space policy, and even when requiring quick architecture reconfigurations as a consequence of breakup events or other unexpected situations, providing a general framework not only to study orbital capacity, but also to assess design possibilities and their evolution for Space Traffic Management systems. To this end, this work summarizes some of results obtained from the study of slotting architectures for Space Traffic Management. This includes the assessment of intrinsic orbital capacity using satellite constellation theory, the analysis of slotting reconfiguration possibilities and substructures, the development of perturbation theory for its used in shell separation design, and the estimation of the impact that missions have in the overall intrinsic orbital capacity of the system.
| Which section would you like to submit your abstract to? | Session 11: “Space capacity management” |
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