2024/10/31 by Ricardo Ferreira, Ferreira, Ricardo N., Marta Guimarães +3
Engineering · #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Mathematics #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Spacecraft Design and Technology #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.24092
openalex publication_date 2024/10/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The amount of debris in orbit has increased significantly over the years. With the recent growth of interest in space exploration, conjunction assessment has become a central issue. One important metric to evaluate conjunction risk is the miss distance. However, this metric does not intrinsically take into account uncertainty distributions. Some work has been developed to consider the uncertainty associated with the position of the orbiting objects, in particular, to know if these uncertainty distributions overlap (e.g., ellipsoids when considering Gaussian distributions). With this work, we present fast solutions to not only check if the ellipsoids overlap but to compute the distance between them, which we call margin. We present two fast solution methods for two different paradigms: when the best-known data from both objects can be centralized (e.g., debris-satellite conjunctions) and when the most precise covariances cannot be shared (conjunctions of satellites owned by different operators). Our methods are both accurate and fast, being able to process 15,000 conjunctions per minute with the centralized solution and approximately 490 conjunctions per minute with the distributed solution.