https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20070013702/downloads/20070013702.pdf

A sensitivity study of the effectiveness of active debris removal in LEO

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20060024585/downloads/20060024585.pdf

Instability of the Present LEO Satellite Populations

The many futures of active debris removal

A LEO satellite postmission disposal study using legend

Outer space has after the Cold War enjoyed two decades of fairly peaceful development but is once again becoming more competitive and contested with increased militarization. Therefore, it is important the U.S. maintain its space superiority to ensure it has the capabilities modern warfare requires for successful operations. The difference with earlier periods in space is there is not a blatantly publicized arms race in space but instead a covert challenge to U.S. interest in maintaining superiority, resilience, and capability. There are a finite number of nations that consider themselves geopolitical actors, but as long as the U.S. maintains space superiority those states must play according to a set of rules written without their consent and forced upon them. For authoritarian regimes, U.S. space assets monitor their actions and pursuit of regional influence and this is quite disturbing. For them, any degradation or limitation of U.S. spaceborne capabilities would be seen as a successful outcome. Cyber warfare offers these adversarial actors the opportunity to directly or indirectly destroy U.S. space assets with minimal risk due to limited attribution and traceability.

Designer Satellite Collisions from Covert Cyber War

EVOLVE 4.0 orbital debris mitigation studies

NASA's Debris Assessment Software (DAS) has been substantially revised and expanded. DAS is designed to assist NASA programs in performing orbital debris assessments, as described in NASA s Guidelines and Assessment Procedures for Limiting Orbital Debris. The extensive upgrade of DAS was undertaken to reflect changes in the debris mitigation guidelines, to incorporate recommendations from DAS users, and to take advantage of recent software capabilities for greater user utility. DAS 2.0 includes an updated environment model and enhanced orbital propagators and reentry-survivability models. The ORDEM96 debris environment model has been replaced by ORDEM2000 in DAS 2.0, which is also designed to accept anticipated revisions to the environment definition. Numerous upgrades have also been applied to the assessment of human casualty potential due to reentering debris. Routines derived from the Object Reentry Survival Analysis Tool, Version 6 (ORSAT 6), determine which objects are assessed to survive reentry, and the resulting risk of human casualty is calculated directly based upon the orbital inclination and a future world population database. When evaluating reentry risks, the user may enter up to 200 unique hardware components for each launched object, in up to four nested levels. This last feature allows the software to more accurately model components that are exposed below the initial breakup altitude. The new DAS 2.0 provides an updated set of tools for users to assess their mission s compliance with the NASA Safety Standard and does so with a clear and easy-to-understand interface. The new native Microsoft Windows graphical user interface (GUI) is a vast improvement over the previous DOS-based interface. In the new version, functions are more-clearly laid out, and the GUI includes the standard Windows-style Help functions. The underlying routines within the DAS code are also improved.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20070013703/downloads/20070013703.pdf

J.N. Opiela

Papers

EVOLVE 4.0 orbital debris mitigation studies

Improvements to NASA's Debris Assessment Software