Through the rapidly increasing use of space over the last decades, Space Safety steadily moving into the spotlight of today’s astronautical ambitions worldwide to ensure a sustainable use of Earth’s orbit. In the recent years, space institutions including the European Space Agency (ESA) adopted their Space Safety Program as one of the main pillars of their future activities. Space Safety does not exclusively concern itself with humans on board and on ground, but also implies the mitigation, removal and prevention of space debris as well as space traffic management.
Especially, the rapid growing number of human-made objects in Earth orbit makes it crucial to monitor and safely manage the traffic in our “sky-ways”. The “New Space”, including huge satellite constellations for global internet access and telecommunication, pose a big threat, as increasing space traffic can dramatically increase the risk of collisions.
Since 2019, the Institute of Flight Systems and Automatic Control (FSR) at TU Darmstadt has been working on projects for the sustainable use of Earth orbit including enhanced simulations of the orbit-environment, assessment of conjunctions between satellites and the development of future collision avoidance processes. Therefore, the activities capitalize the present expertise and long-standing experience of the FSR and build upon the results and capabilities gathered in the field of air traffic management systems and tools for manned and unmanned aerial vehicles, combined with the proficiency in space systems.
Moreover, a unique environment for the interdisciplinary work in this project is provided by the ESA_Lab@TU Darmstadt, which enables students and researchers to develop innovative solutions efficiently, agilely and in parallel.
Projects
CASCADE - ongoing
As part of the CASCADE activity a Mission Analysis Software is developed which enables actors in the space domain to find rule sets for collision avoidance operations and estimate the associated consequences.
Rules4CREAM (R4C) - completed
Within the Rules4CREAM (R4C) activity, rulesets for handling conjunctions of operational spacecraft are developed and assessed.
