Multiple Debris Orbital Collision Avoidance

Abstract

Recently, Mission safety become an important concern because of the exponentially increment of space objects crossing or accompany the orbit. In such a situation the risk value becomes more and more as these controlled and uncontrolled objects increase. Therefore, mission control centers depend on organizations as joint space operation center to use their supplied information to schedule a smart plan to minimize the orbit risk. This paper proposes a new technique in the field of satellite safe trajectory incorporating orbital separation distance between different orbiting objects in artificial potential field method rather than position difference as in many cases the difference between them is enormous. Satellite surroundings are represented by artificial field where counterpart objects are represented by repulsive potentials, and future predicted path as an attractive field. Therefore, prospective planned maneuver considers all surrounding objects with different probability within the same algorithm. The proposed method is then applied to a real case between a Chinese 'cz-4' and the United States 'DMSP 5D-2 F7' satellites and show the results before and after applying the algorithm with calculations of the velocity required to escape risk situation and maintain the necessary orbital parameters. Finally, a comparative study is implemented to determine the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the well-known Hohmann maneuver. � 2019 IEEE.