Abstract:
Space Traffic Coordination (STC) is vital to enable enduring space safety. STC deliberations are both highly technical and diverse; the suite of capabilities and the number of stakeholders involved complicate understanding of the relevant features of required STC activities. The authors propose that looking at STC within a cognitive framework that focuses on showing your work, sharing your work, and understanding the big picture will enhance global acceptance and adherence to relevant best practices. Showing your work is commonplace in scientific communities. Space object positional uncertainty, space object size/orientation, and probability of collision calculations with an emphasis on error estimation and propagation would be a welcome and refreshing enhancement within the space community today. Satellite encounters, or on-orbit conjunctions between two operational satellites, are occurring at an accelerating rate. Peer review of these calculations benefits the entire ecosystem. Sharing work comprises the exchange of multisource spacecraft operator and space situational awareness (SSA) system information within and across the space community to permit mutual awareness, enable collaborative debris mitigation of collision risk, and allows spacecraft operators to share authoritative spacecraft information to the extent they are willing and able. Such information can include manoeuvrability characteristics, historical and planned maneuvers, maneuver timelines, ephemerides, spacecraft dimensions, activity status, avoidance maneuver metrics, go/no-go thresholds, and risk abatement goals. We will discuss enabling mechanisms for such data sharing, to include industry and government data sharing and analysis portals, and data exchange standards. Understanding the big picture requires an evaluation of the balance between operational satellites, clouds of fragments, and intact derelicts by altitude. Collecting metrics (e.g., state, quantity, and mass, etc.) on objects in these three families (i.e., operational satellites, breakup fragments, and intact derelicts) provides a foundation for examining likely growth rates of the debris population. Operational satellites versus debris may be a more challenging dilemma than that of operational satellites versus other operational satellites since debris does not have the ability to move or manage its collision risk. The synthesis of these three acts is a coherent network of best practices, situational awareness, and mathematical rigor required to ensure enduring space safety (i.e. space sustainability).
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McKnight, D., Oltrogge, D.L., Vasile, M., and Shouppe, M., “Space Traffic Coordination Framework for Success,” 2024 International Astronautical Congress, 14 Oct 2024.
