Cassien Jobic, CNES; Emmanuel Delande, CNES; Johannes Gelhaus, DLR; Cornelius Vogt, German Space Agency at DLR; Alessandra Di Cecco, ASI; Valentin Baral, CNES; Cristina Pérez Hernández, CDTI; Daniel Stelmecke, DLR; Matthieu Thierry, CNES
Keywords: eusst, ssa, stm, remediation, mitigation
Abstract:
The programme EU SST (“European Space Surveillance and Tracking”) evolved into a fully-fledged component of the European Union Space Programme adopted on 28 April 2021, after it has been set up in 2016 on the basis of the “Decision of the European Parliament and the Council Establishing a Space Surveillance and Tracking Support Framework” adopted on April 16, 2014. EU SST contributes to the global burden sharing of ensuring the safe, sustainable and guaranteed access to and use of space for all. Its primary objective is the provision of space-safety services, namely, to protect spacecraft from the risk of collision, to monitor uncontrolled re-entries, and to survey the in-orbit fragmentation of space objects, on the basis of proprietary and third-party measurements and orbit data. For that purpose, the design and the performance analysis of a global EU SST system architecture proving best value for money for the medium and long term has been established as one of the main activities of EU SST.
To facilitate a sustained long-term evolution and enhancement of EU SST, the EU SST Partnership put in place a Research and Development (R&D) plan consisting of of hardware and software R&D activities. For the implementation of the EU SST R&D plan, the members of the Partnership not only coordinate research efforts within the EU SST programme and in coherence with national R&D programmes, but also actively involve industry, academia and start-ups in the development of research activities.
The EU SST R&D plan has the objective to increase the European strategic autonomy in the SSA domain while stimulating the competitiveness of the European commercial ecosystem.For this purpose, EU SST has set up the European Union Industry and Start-Forum (EISF). This forum started on 26 April 2022. It provides a platform to foster the innovation and competitiveness of the SSA’s commercial sector to achieve a higher level of strategic autonomy in Europe through a structured dialogue between the EU SST Partnership, the European Commission, industry, and start-ups.
The paper intends to provide an overview of the EU SST R&D plan. The first part of this plan will include improvements in the results of the cataloguing function and the cataloguing function itself thanks to R&D activities on sensors as well as and algorithms or methods.
For the next three years, EUSST will contribute to and support innovations not only on sensors with well-established technologies (radars, lasers, on-ground optical sensors) but also space-based sensors.
Many elements of the SBSS technology are challenging such as the repartition between on-ground and on-board delegated computations, observation strategies, and compression algorithms. As this technology has the potential to improve detection capabilities considerably and, thus, the results of the cataloguing function, EU SST addresses these questions on behalf of the European Union.
In addition, reworks on uncertainties considerations in analytical propagation, attitude and manoeuvres determination thanks to observed data or radio frequency emission characterization are planned in order to improve cataloguing and long-term predictions, which are basics set of data needed for services provision.
Due to the improvement of detection capabilities, the simulation system currently used to evaluate long-term scalability of EU SST regarding the space population by drawing a recommended network composition, will be improved thanks to digital twin concepts, details of which will be described in this paper.
Besides, as EU SST intends to be a catalyser for the European commercial ecosystem, a platform will be developed hosting commercial services demanding a high security level for data protection and confidential use. Planned R&D activities on a secure network will be presented in this paper, such as assessing the benefits of Distributed Ledger Technologies in an operative context dealing with space operations.
Finally,this R&D plan, details of which will be described in the paper, aims to increase operational services such as collision avoidance (CA), re-entry (RE) and fragmentation (FG) ensuring a high reactivity level of services and high-fidelity analysis provided by EU SST
Date of Conference: September 19-22, 2023
Track: Space Domain Awareness