Development of a debris index

Abstract

Environmental indices for space objects have been proposed to identify good candidates for active debris removal missions and to deal with the licensing process of space objects before their launch. A way to rank the environmental impact of spacecraft may be based on the assessment of how their fragmentations would affect operational satellites. In particular, the effect of a breakup can be measured by the resulting collision probability for a set of target spacecraft. A grid in semi-major axis, inclination, and mass is used to define possible initial conditions of the breakup. Once the value of the index is known for any point in the grid, a simple interpolation can be used to compute the value of the index for any object. The current work aims to extend a previous formulation, which focussed only on the effect of collisions, by including also the effect of explosions and considering the likelihood of these fragmentations.