Sergei Nikolaev (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Donald Phillion (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), H. Keo Springer (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Willem deVries (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Ming Jiang (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Alex Pertica (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), John Henderson (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Matthew Horsley (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Scot Olivier (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Keywords: Orbital Debris
Abstract:
The Kessler Syndrome (runaway increase in the number of orbiting debris fragments through cascading collisions) presents a serious danger to future space missions. To understand its implications and study the effectiveness of various proposed debris mitigation strategies, long-term evolutionary models for near-Earth space environment (e.g. NASAs LEGEND, ESAs MASTER-2009) are used. Because of the long timescales involved, existing models represent the orbiting population by some average spatial density functions, resulting in a limited spatial and temporal resolution of such models. Here, we present the brute force approach to evolutionary debris modeling, by propagating and monitoring every object in orbit for the length of the simulation (100+ years). The approach involved designing a custom, efficient orbital propagator, coupled with a fast conjunction analysis module. The resulting highly parallel simulation code was run on LLNLs supercomputers, due to the extremely demanding computing power requirements. Here we present some of the results of these high-fidelity simulations. This approach allows unprecedented, high-resolution view of the evolution of orbiting populations, and establishes new state of the art in evolutionary debris modeling.
Date of Conference: September 11-14, 2012
Track: Orbital Debris