22 Feb 2023

cascade

As the number of artificial satellites orbiting our planet grows, the likelihood of collisions increases, potentially triggering a cascade effect making certain orbits unusable.

cascade is a C++/Python library developed to propagate the evolution of large number of orbiting objects while detecting reliably close encounters and collisions. It is coded in modern C++20 with focus on the efficency of the underlying N-body simulation with collision/conjunction detection. Its development was motivated to help conjunction tracking and collision detection of orbiting space debris populations.

Notable features include:

  • a new and original collision detection algorithm based on high order Taylor expansions,
  • guaranteed detection of all occuring collisions and conjunctions, high precision orbital propagation via Taylor integration,
  • possibility to define custom dynamics,
  • automatic usage of modern SIMD instruction sets (including AVX/AVX2/AVX-512/Neon/VSX),
  • automatic multi-threaded parallelisation.

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Advanced Concepts Team