3 Designing Collision Alert System for Space Situational Awareness
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Published:2010
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This paper considers the problem of tracking space objects and propagating their orbital trajectories for declaring potential collision events and assessing corresponding collision probabilities. The design of the complex collision alert system for space situational awareness needs to consider the space object motion uncertainty, the possible earth blockage between the space borne observer and the object being tracked, and any intentional orbital changes that may lead to a collision to any existing resident space object. We apply a nonlinear filtering technique to estimate the orbital state of the space object and a Monte Carlo method to assess the collision probability of any potential encounter. We also develop a collision alert model using realistic encounter scenarios of geostationary objects being observed by low-earth orbit satellites. We quantify the performance of the collision alert system in terms of detection probability, false alarm probability, and average delay from the onset time of an object maneuver resulting in a collision path.