Federated Conjunction Assessment: A Framework for Reconciling Multiple Risk Assessment Solutions

Proliferation of space situational awareness introduces a challenge: how should a spacecraft operator reconcile multiple, conflicting risk assessments for a single conjunction event? Lower-quality solutions with large uncertainties may inflate risk estimates and lead to unnecessary mitigation action while higher-quality solutions with lower risk estimates are discarded in the interest of conservatism. A decision framework is presented to systematically evaluate and reconcile multiple solutions for two satellites in a prospective conjunction. The framework operates in three phases: initial actionability assessment, statistical consistency among candidate solutions and final adjudication using direct-hit missed detection probability. The framework is applied to three historical case studies. The method provides a rigorous, scalable foundation for algorithmic decision-making in an increasingly federated space situational awareness paradigm.