PD ISO/TR 16158:2021 - Page 2

Space systems. Avoiding collisions among orbiting objects. | Status: Current

1 Scope This document is a guide for establishing essential collaborative enterprises to sustain the space environment and employ it effectively. This document describes some widely used techniques for perceiving close approaches, estimating collision probability, estimating the cumulative probability of survival, and manoeuvring to avoid collisions.

NOTE Satellite operators accept that all conjunction and collision assessment techniques are statistical. All suffer false positives and/or missed detections. The degree of uncertainty in the estimated outcomes is not uniform across all satellite orbits or all assessment intervals. No comparison within a feasible number of test cases can reveal the set of techniques that is uniformly most appropriate for all.