Decision Aid for Conjunction Risk Mitigation by Differential Drag

The NASA Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team has conducted are view of the historical record of high-risk conjunctions involving CARA-protected missions and evaluated whether (and how much) differential drag can provide effective mitigation. From this analysis, CARA has identified a rule of thumb: missions with perigees below 560 km capable of tripling their drag area for 72 hours(or a larger scale factor for a lesser amount of time) can reliably use differential drag to remediate high-risk events.