OSC Releases TraCSS Consolidated Pathfinder Results
This week at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Milan, the Office of Space Commerce (OSC) released a paper titled, “The TraCSS Consolidated Pathfinder: Leveraging Commercial Capability in LEO.” The paper describes results and findings from OSC’s recently concluded Consolidated Pathfinder project, an effort conducted in partnership with five commercial space companies to inform the development of the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS).
The Consolidated Pathfinder aimed to inform OSC on contractual metrics, methods, and structures that will enable use of commercial space situational awareness (SSA) capabilities to support spaceflight safety in low Earth orbit (LEO). A secondary goal was to explore the commercial sector’s capabilities to maintain a LEO object catalog.
The pathfinder provided an opportunity to combine data between two different commercial providers and demonstrated that commercial SSA data can be successfully integrated into conjunction assessment operations and LEO catalog maintenance. In addition, OSC was able to gain some insight and experience with metrics for use in future acquisitions and TraCSS operations.
However, some challenges remain; specifically, the TraCSS program has to re-examine assumptions about the benefit of “surge tracking” to provide additional information for conjunctions of interest. Finally, the results provide insights into the characteristics of a commercially acquired and maintained LEO catalog.
Results and Findings
- Surge Tracking: The pathfinder tested the ability to “chase and improve” tracking for conjunctions of interest to improve actionability to the satellite owner/operators by augmenting DoD data with commercial tracking. While improvements were achieved for some objects, the overall benefit in reducing uncertainty, and thus increasing actionability of a conjunction data message, was limited.
- Catalog Maintenance: The pathfinder maintained a significant portion of the DoD catalog that it was tasked with maintaining. Prediction errors for the objects that could be evaluated were substantially equivalent between the pathfinder and DoD. DoD solutions were generally more stable and realistic compared to commercial providers, particularly in areas like atmospheric density modeling.
- Discrepancies in Solutions: A notable challenge was the divergence in collision risk assessments produced by the DoD and pathfinder systems. In about 12% of serious events, one system recommended mitigation action, while the other dismissed the event.