Nebula Public Library

The population of non-operational objects in the space environment is raising, increasing concern about the safety of operations for current and future space activities. In this respect, space agencies and in particular ESA with its ESA/ADMIN/IPOL (2014) have established policies to mitigate space debris creation. Please refer to the compendium of space debris mitigation standards adopted by states and international organizations, [RD.5], for additional information. This basically implies that satellites in LEO and GEO shall perform an End Of Life (EOL) disposal with a reliability of 90%.

The project summarized here was conceived to support the definition of applications, products and user requirements, as well as the hardware design and ground processing design of a companion satellite mission which will carry aboard a "passive" radar working in tandem with the Argentinian L-band radar developed by CONAE and denoted as SAOCOM. The primary objective (i.e., science driver) of the SAOCOM companion satellite mission (SAOCOM-CS) is forest tomography, which will be carried out by exploiting small baselines between active and passive systems (order of km) changing with time.

The overall objective of this study is to assess constellations of two pairs of satellites for the retrieval of time-variable gravity field information for best quality scientific monitoring of mass distribution and transport in the Earth system. Before embarking on this study the geodetic community and space agencies have come to realize that weaknesses in current single-pair gravimetric satellite missions such as GRACE or GRACE-FO (to be launched in 2017) would significantly be alleviated by having a second GRACE-type pair in space simultaneously.

The simulations of the long term evolution of the space debris population, under realistic assumptions, show how the driving factor in the future environment will be mostly the breakup of large spacecraft and rocket bodies in LEO.