The long-term modelling of space debris clouds in high Earth orbits

Abstract

The GEO regime represents a growing debris environment that poses a significant long-term collision hazard to future launched spacecraft.  To date, relatively little work has been done in modelling space debris in GEO, although this is a trend that is just beginning to be reversed as more and more emphasis is placed on GEO debris modelling. 

Space debris models can have very long run times and, depending on the input parameters, can take several days to generate a prediction of the future debris environment, even on the fastest of machines.  The orbital propagator is one of the most time-consuming components in any debris model and thus, in an effort to reduce run-times, many debris models utilise various techniques to attempt to improve on the speeds of their orbital propagators.  All of these techniques involve some forfeit in the accuracy of the results produced and most depend on assumptions which are only really valid in the LEO regime.  To date, little work has been done in the development of a fast method of propagating debris clouds in the GEO regime.  This PhD attempts to address this problem by developing an accurate and novel Fast Cloud Propagator (FCP) for use in high-Earth orbits, including GEO and the GEO regime.

The FCP has undergone rigorous testing and has proved itself capable of accurately modelling the debris clouds produced by a number of breakup events, as modelled by a number of leading breakup models, over various time periods (up to the maximum design threshold of 100 years), in a variety of test orbits.  A comprehensive risk analysis exercise has shown that the FCP results are accurate enough to be used in future collision risk analyses and hence in future debris environment prediction studies.  The speed increases attained by the FCP depend on the size of the debris cloud, where the efficiency of the FCP increases as the number of fragments in the cloud increases.  If a large number of Monte Carlo simulations are required, as is desirable in debris environment prediction studies, then the FCP has demonstrated speed increases which can be thousands of times faster than conventional methods of space debris propagation.

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