Satellite Orbital Coordination Improving but Still Has a Way to Go: Operators
A big impediment to safe operations in orbit is the difficulty of getting anyone on the line about an impending near-miss, satellite operators said in an Aerospace Corp. webinar Wednesday. Communication, particularly with Chinese satellite operators, "is getting better," but needs further improvement, said Ryan Shepperd, Iridium's lead engineer for collision assessment and avoidance. The space sustainability event also included discussions about ways to better separate satellites from one another as orbits become increasingly congested.
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Reaching a U.S., European or Japanese satellite operator is typically pretty simple, Shepperd said, as contact information is often readily available via Space-Track.org, the Space Command portal for space data, he said. But contacting the operator of a Chinese satellite is much more difficult, he said. "Outside the Western allies, we have some [communications] policy issues to address." Often, those messages must be emailed to the Chinese government, a process that doesn't usually work efficiently, Shepperd noted. Handling a possible conjunction with a maneuverable satellite without data about that satellite's position and velocity "gets a lot trickier to figure out what that maneuver should be."
Yash Chandramouli, Amazon Leo's space sustainability engineer, said contact information is more valuable than a satellite operator sharing maneuverability status or precise position and velocity because there can be questions about the accuracy of the information. With contact information, any issue can be hammered out in coordination talks, he said.
Lorenzo Giudici, a space sustainability engineer for Telesat, said the company's planned Lightspeed low earth orbit constellation will operate at 1,300 kilometers -- high enough that there won't be much other satellite traffic to avoid. The bigger concern is while raising or deorbiting its Lightspeeds to or from that altitude, since the satellites must cross through orbits with denser traffic. He said it's a problem that there's no global space traffic coordination framework, which would allow satellite operators to coordinate their satellites' activities beforehand, nor a good way of reaching out to one another if a near-miss is looming.
Low earth orbit today lacks good separation between constellations, Shepperd said. "Basically, we have highways without lanes," with satellites weaving back and forth. Fixed orbits would reduce the amount of interaction that constellations have with one another, he said.
Shepperd also said that while it's common for operators to share where their satellites are and where they're going, they don't often share where they want their satellites to be. But Shepperd also warned that a cap on the probability of collisions could drive satellite operators to opt for larger constellations.
The satellite operators were generally upbeat about the Commerce Department's traffic coordination system for space, which the agency is beta testing now. TraCSS is intended to replace traffic coordination work done by DOD. Shepperd said Iridium, a TraCSS pilot tester, is "very impressed" with the progress. Chandramouli said that TraCSS is heading in the right direction.