Short and Middle Term Uncontrolled Re-Entry Monitoring Using Public Space Debris Catalogues

Abstract

As an early warning and crisis management tool, CNES has developed and implemented an algorithm in order to monitor the short and middle term uncontrolled re-entry of space objects. As far as this monitoring intends to be as exhaustive as possible, in term of objects monitored, and due to the use of public space debri s catalogues among other catalogues, the detection and filtering of aberrant data as well as the detection of maneuvered space objects is also implemented by our algorithm, and consequently addressed on this paper. As external catalogues are used, and in order to cope with the lack of knowledge that we have about the conventions used to compute the data contained on them, the unpredictable quality as well as the sparse nature of the time series distributio n of the catalogued data, this paper also describes how the algorithm has been designed in order to monitor for short and middle term reentries, without a major loss on the re-entr y prediction performances.