The rush to obtain space real estate has created an increase in planned satellite launches and with it an increase in potential fragmentation events. These events generate debris fragments that threaten the usability of space. Providing timely, accurate, and statistically significant Space Situational Awareness (SSA) data is crucial to protect space assets and operations. Determining the point of initial breakup, the blast point, is valuable in characterizing and modeling the event. A standard approximation of the blast point is to propagate the mean orbits of well-tracked debris fragments, backward in time, to the time of closest approach. At this time, fragment positions are averaged to determine the blast point location. The errors in this approach arise from the uncertainty in debris fragment state and the uncertainty in the time of the fragmentation event. Accounting for these uncertainties can increase blast point estimation accuracies. In this paper, the authors discuss the complexities involved in this approximation and discuss methods used to determine the blast point. Parameters such as the number of tracked debris fragments and the uncertainty in both time and fragment state are used to develop an understanding of method sensitivities. The authors present multiple approaches for blast point determination that take advantage of fragment state uncertainty. These techniques are tested using GEO fragmentation events simulated according to NASA's standard breakup model.
展开▼
