A Comparison of Satellite Conjunction Analysis Screening Tools

Satellite collision avoidance analysis has received increased attention primarily due to the Iridium-COSMOS collision of February 2009, including consideration by the US Air Force of regular “all vs all” collision avoidance screening of the entire space catalog. Traditionally this type of analysis has been limited by computational resources. This analysis considers the accuracy and completeness of results achieved by six conjunction analysis screening tools in development or use in a variety of commercial and government settings. The focus of this research is large scale conjunction screening with a primary test case of a 7 day, 11K object computation producing on the order of 100K results. The focus of this analysis is on the completeness and correctness of the results. The time and computational resources required to perform the analysis is not considered at this time.