A space surveillance satellite for cataloging high-altitude small debris

Abstract

This paper proposes a space surveillance satellite whose mission is to detect, catalog and maintain space debris as small as 10 cm in the Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) region. To fulfill the objective, the satellite is designed to be placed on a zero-inclination orbit of 4163 km in altitude. The payload is a large optical telescope with a 1.5 m Entrance Pupil Diameter (EPD) and a 20° × 20° Field of View (FoV). Based on these configurations, a 60-day simulation experiment is organized to evaluate the debris detecting and cataloging performances of the satellite. The simulation results show that the satellite is capable of detecting small debris higher than 4163 km. About 94.7% of 10 cm debris in the GEO region are detected more than 60 times over the 60-day simulation span by the satellite. In addition, the rules-based cataloging and maintaining capability of the satellite is close to 50.0% with regard to an entire 10 cm reference population of 3267 debris. For larger size debris, the results are more optimistic. This paper also assesses the performances of our Initial Orbit Determination (IOD) and Un-Correlated Track (UCT) association methods for 74 debris in the GEO region. The IOD success rate is 97.4% by applying a range-search based method. The True Positive (TP) association rate is 89.7% and the False Positive (FP) rate is 1.8%. Accordingly, 66 of the 74 space objects are correctly identified that each has at least two detection arcs, making accurate orbit determination possible.