Pablo Minguijon Pallas, Eutelsat Group; Calum Hervieu, Eutelsat Group; Ignacio Dominguez-Adame Palomo, Eutelsat Group
Keywords: Space Traffic Management, Conjunction, COLA, Collision Avoidance, Big Data, Large Constellations, OneWeb, Aggregated Risk, Realized Risk,
Abstract:
As space traffic congestion increases, academia, industry, and regulatory bodies are working from different perspectives to ensure the safety and sustainability of space operations.
Broadly, safety and sustainability assessments rely on metrics that can be categorized as either “predictive” (i.e., events that may occur) or “realized” (i.e., events that have already occurred).
One often overlooked “realized” behavior is the quantification of a space operator’s effective and practical ability to manage collision risk while in orbit. This type of risk can be looked at from two angles: (a) risk that has been actively or passively reduced or eliminated (i.e., abated), and (b) risk that has been intentionally or unintentionally “accepted” (i.e., residual).
In given circumstances, and for an increasingly congested space environment, accepted residual risk could become a non-negligible contributor to both the overall risk that deployed systems undergo and the impact that those systems pose to the space environment.
This paper presents methods for Owner/Operators (O/Os) to monitor their operational residual risk and use it as a benchmark with a dual purpose: (a) to explicitly expose and quantify the ability of an O/O’s system (ground- or space-based) to achieve safe navigation in their orbital neighborhood, and (b) to support a two-fold feedback loop, an internal one for the business to tweak their risk posture and an external one for regulatory agencies to verify that systems are safely operated.
This discussion opens the question of how to expose relevant information to the appropriate stakeholders. Finally, this paper present and propose some reporting methods as operationally used and in development by the Eutelsat Group LEO Constellation (formerly OneWeb).
Date of Conference: September 16-19, 2025
Track: Space Domain Awareness