ESA Space Debris collision avoidance assistance

The objective of CREAM (Collision Risk Estimation and Automated Mitigation) is to demonstrate a ‘decision support system’ for collision avoidance manoeuvres, the integration and deployment of a pilot for automated and secure exchange of spacecraft manoeuvre plans and enhancement of autonomous decisions. The expansion of the envelope for autonomous decisions will increase the robustness and cover low relative velocity encounters, continuous and/or autonomous orbit control (low thrust/drag control), maturation of collision avoidance during early operations and initial orbit acquisition campaigns. Means to assess the quality of operator data will be required. A demonstration will be possible through, e.g., an expert facility to support data fusion in the risk assessment process. In CREAM it is proposed to further define decision criteria beyond collision probability, e.g. by considering environment indexes or capacity metrics.