Mark Vincent, Raytheon
Keywords: Probability of Collision, Risk Mitigation Theory and Decision Process
Abstract:
The operational aspects of mitigating the risks from orbital debris are increasing in complexity. The number of conjunctions for a typical satellite in Low Earth Orbit is increasing due to previous collisions and explosions. This will be exacerbated when tracking of secondaries with smaller diameters becomes functional in the future. Utilizing more frequent Risk Mitigation Maneuvers must be balanced to account for the negative consequences of doing the maneuvers. These consequences include possible interruptions to science observation, deviations from the desired orbit/groundtrack and the expenses involved in designing and executing the maneuver. Another complication of the maneuvers is the potential of post-maneuver conjunctions which have to be accounted for with the added factor of the maneuver execution error. Another complication of analyzing the original conjunction is the well-known dependence of the Probability of Collision (Pc) on the uncertainty in the orbit predictions of both primary and secondary and the conjunction geometry. The natural behavior is to have a low Pc when these uncertainties are large, then as the uncertainties decrease to first reach a maximum value of Pc and then decrease again to small values (assuming that there actually is not a collision). There has been a lot of academic study of methods to make these uncertainty predictions better match their true values. This paper will present a study of how these theoretical studies can best help the operational analysis and decision making processes, including comparisons to existing tools. The latter includes quantification of the confidence levels in the current Pc and how the range of future Pc values are a function of new tracking data and the de-weighting of old tracking data. Copyright © 2015 Raytheon Company. All rights reserved.
Date of Conference: September 15-18, 2015
Track: Astrodynamics