Satellite collision prompts calls for orbital traffic management
By Rob Coppinger
The collision earlier this month that destroyed an Iridium communications satellite has prompted a call for a multinational space situational awareness network and the integrated use of operators' spacecraft orbit data.
Following the 10 February collision between the Iridium-33 and a Russian Cosmos 2251 satellite thought to be in a degrading orbit, the Secure World Foundation proposed the idea of an international situational awareness network to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. The foundation's membership includes space safety professionals while it is an advocate for the secure use of spacecraft.
Since the collision, international assumptions that the US military monitored all space objects have been shown to be wrong. It was US satellite operator Iridium that first detected the collision due to signal loss, not the US Air Force Space Command (AFSC), which operates the country's space situational awareness system. Iridium asked AFSC for an explanation.
The leadership of the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, which represents space safety professionals, supports greater situational awareness co-operation. The association's president Tommaso Sgobba says: "We need common rules. It should be like air traffic control with some ground-based radar and something like a virtual [Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast] system through the integrated use of spacecraft operators data."
In addition, Flight International has learned that commercial software for collision prediction, based on US data, can not reliably predict collisions. And the US military has the capacity to carry out only a limited number of accurate predictions.
Fear of another collision is leading commercial satellite operators to pool their orbital parameters knowledge through a "clearing house" to filter relevant data to avoid distribution of commercially sensitive data.
The European Space Agency has just started its own space situational awareness project and some experts think this should be re-evaluated to make sure it meets the new collision threat.
