Context:
EUSST (European Union Space Surveillance & Tracking) is a subcomponent of SSA (Situational Space Awareness) programme born from the need of management of the growing complexity of the orbital environment, and it is in charge of guaranteeing the safety and security of space environment either for space operations or the safeguard of space assets. This intricated orbital environment can result on a risk of collision between spacecraft and space debris. At the same time, objects may re-enter and cause damage on the ground. Therefore, the characterization of space surroundings through surveillance and tracking are essential allowing EUSST to have a broader insight of these circumstances. Currently, EUSST is providing services of Collision Avoidance (CA), Re-Entry Analysis (RE) and Fragmentation Analysis (FG).
The evolution of current system aims to cope with space surveillance challenges, so design and optimization of the architecture are essential for overcoming ongoing constraints. In order to improve service provision capabilities, this grant covers the inclusion of digital twin as a prime role to play since enables precise simulations which allows events, such as detection of malfunctions, optimization of several tasks, or repetition of past events regarding to aforementioned services. In short, the impact of the project will be:
• Increasing the EU SST scalability to new data acquisition concepts;
• Increasing the EU SST catalogue accuracy and in the end, the performance of each EUSST’s service;
• Increasing the autonomy of the EUSST.
To reach this, several activities have been carried out to maximize the impact and contribution of EU SST towards ensuring a sustainable and guaranteed access to and use of space as well as global burden-sharing in the domain of Space Situational Awareness, accomplishing the safety and security of European economies, societies and citizens.
Overall objectives:
In order to ensure the safety of space environment and sustain Europe’s pioneering role in future missions, new activities are performed. This is the Space Based SST project, that has been implemented in the form of a Specific Grant Agreement (SGA) addressing the objectives identified in the Space Regulation and the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2021-2022 :
• Study of various mission configurations (e.g. orbit regime, orbit plan etc.) and payload location to maximize the number of observed and catalogued objects, and other performance targets such as e.g. improve observation of objects not well seen from Earth sensors, increase of number of observations, increase of the catalogue accuracy, etc.).
• Study of coordination strategy and techniques among the satellites of the SBSS mission and the terrestrial SST system.
• Develop or improve existing algorithms allowing going from detection to cataloguing (e.g. IOD, correlation etc.) taking into account ground-based SST system and payload performance (i.e. observable magnitude).
• Exploration of the use of non-dedicated sensors (e.g. star trackers) or hosted payloads in non-dedicated missions (“opportunistic” solutions) to reduce cost of operation is also an aspect to develop.
• Security issues related to the link between SBSS and ground EUSST network.
