Short-Term Space Occupancy and Conjunction Filter

Abstract: Conjunction analysis (CA) for resident space objects (RSOs) is essential for preventing collisions in an increasingly crowded orbital environment and preserving the operational integrity of satellites. A first and fundamental step in the CA process is to estimate the range of altitudes that each object can occupy, throughout an operational screening time of, typically, a few days. In this paper, a method is poroposed to analytically evaluate such range of altitudes in a zonal problem model and for a time horizon of generic duration thereby generalizing the concept of space occupancy (SO) introduced in a recent work. The proposed method is exploited to construct a new conjunction filter that considerably improves the classical apogee-perigee filter routinely employed in CA. The effectiveness of the new filter is assessed in a low-Earth orbit (LEO) scenario using a high-fidelity perturbation model across a broad spectrum of orbits and conjunction geometries. Additionally, the method is applied to space traffic management providing a rapid and efficient means to examine the radial overlap of RSOs in LEO and track its progression in time.