Estimating the Number of Debris in the Geostationary Ring
- Paper number
IAC-05-B6.1.07
- Author
Mr. Rudiger Jehn, European Space Agency/ESOC, Germany
- Year
2005
- Abstract
The European Space Agency has been using the 1-m Telescope in Tenerife since 1999 to detect and track objects which are in the vicinity of the geostationary ring. Objects as small as about 15 cm were observed. More than 2200 hours of observational data are available now and can be used to make a first estimate of the total number of objects. Since the objects are not uniformly distributed in longitude and latitude and since most of the time the telescope was pointing at high density areas a careful weighting of the statistical data is required.
The approach to estimate the number of debris in the geostationary ring will be the following: The Master 2005 population based on the catalogued population and some simulated explosions (two more or less known explosions and about ten "theoretical" events) will be used to determine the expected detection rates as function of observation time, azimuth and elevation of the Tenerife telescope. However, for each explosion a scaling factor is introduced which allows to increase or decrease the total number of explosion fragments and thus the detection rates. The expected numbers of detections can be described by binomial random variables and since we have large numbers the sum can be approximated by a Gaussian distribution. This is then exploited to calculate a 95
Finally to verify this approach it will be checked whether the number of debris as modelled in MASTER2005 fits nicely in the middle of the calculated confidence interval. This must be the case because both approaches are based on the optical observations from the ESA space debris telescope.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-05-B6.1.07.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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