JSPOC Conjunction Alerts Could Be Improved, Group Says

摘要

U.S. Air Force warnings to satellite op-erators of impending close orbital passes involving their satellites are not reliable, primarily because the service is unable to automatically process precise orbit-location data available from these companies, according to industry officials. A study by satellite operator Intelsat found that the majority of so-called conjunction summary messages it received from the Air Force's Joint Space Operations Center (JSPOC) in September 2011 proved upon further analysis to be false alarms, said Tobias Nassif, Intelsat's vice president of satellite operations and engineering. Nassif also is director of the Space Data Association (SDA), a data-sharing cooperative among commercial satellite operators whose goal is to prevent orbital collisions and radio frequency interference.