Speaker
Description
This paper presents a network-theoretic approach to the analysis of the global health of the space environment. We will first introduce an index measuring the criticality of different orbital regions to the status of the environment.
We will then derive a definition of orbital carrying capacity from the criticality score and relate the region criticality to more common object level risk metrics. The same criticality score will then be used to derive a characteristic time at which effects propagate through the environment.
We will argue that the proposed approach leads to a physically significant and actionable quantification of the status of the environment.
The proposed network-theoretic approach can be shown to provide useful information at both regional and
global level because it captures the inter-dependencies between local events and global evolution. Furthermore, it can differentiate between localised and global-scale widespread growth in space object populations. Simulation results suggest that the proposed criticality score effectively captures the impact of individual missions on the space environment.
| Which section would you like to submit your abstract to? | Session 6: “How to measure the space capacity?” |
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