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NASA's Program to Monitor Orbital Debris in the GEO Belt and the General Problem of Measuring Near-Earth Object Orbits: Similarities and DifferencesOne of the goals for NASA s Orbital Debris Program Office has been to accurately characterize the population of debris in the geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) environment. Most objects larger than about 1 meter in size are regularly tracked and catalogued by the US Space Surveillance System in the GEO regime. The consequence has been that most large intact GEO objects are tracked, but the vast majority of GEO debris fragments are not. Only in recent years have observations been dedicated to characterize the GEO debris population. NASA s efforts have concentrated on using wide field-of-view telescopes to make complete surveys of the GEO regime to better our statistical understanding of the GEO debris population. These telescopes operate in a staring mode, and only make limited short-arc measurements of the orbits. This information, while limited, allows the possibility of debiasing the observations and constructing statistical distributions of orbits in inclination and ascending node. Recent work suggests that we may be able to use statistical methods to estimate better orbit parameters despite the limited data. Both of these types of studies estimating statistical orbit distributions, and estimating accurate orbits using limited short-arc data have direct analogues in ongoing studies of near-Earth objects (NEO) such as asteroids and comets. This talk will describe the GEO study methods in use and being developed at NASA, and will discuss how such methods may or may not be applicable for NEO studies as well.
Document ID
20060026213
Acquisition Source
Johnson Space Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Matney, Mark
(NASA Johnson Space Center Houston, TX, United States)
Date Acquired
August 23, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 2006
Subject Category
Astronomy
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

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