Alessandro Rossi from IFAC-CNR is the first speaker this morning, talking about orbital similarity functions to connect fragments to their 'parent' objects #orbitaldebris2019
Taking advantage of functions typically used to link meteor streams to asteroid families, such as the Minimum Orbit Intersection Distance (MOID)
Simulated fragmentation of a 1000 kg spacecraft using NASA standard breakup model and applied the algorithm to the fragments. Breakup time was estimated to within 1 day but there were large errors in the orbit estimated
Tested the results for clouds containing 249 fragments and 14 fragments. MOID is good for estimating time of the fragmentation regardless of the cloud size.
Also looked at a collisional fragmentation (previous one was an explosion). Saw the same behaviour of the algorithm - good time estimation but poor for the orbit.
Conclusion is that the method is able to characterise different types of fragmentation events. Now looking to speed-up calculation of the MOID.
Q from Mark Matney (NASA): how does the algorithm deal with fragments that are not catalogued until some time after the event. A: this is addressed through use of a high-fidelity propagator, so the method is still effective.
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