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Campbell, John and T.S. Kelso. Examining Codes and Rules for Space. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, June 26, 2007. [ 6 quotes ]

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Currently, Limited Capacity to take Advantage of Space Surveillance Data
 
CAMPBELL: The Chinese ASAT test got our attention. A lot of that debris is in the place where we operate. Our analysts said there are about 30,000 catalogued items in the low-earth orbit (LEO) space where we operate and probably many times more of that in debris that is too small to catalogue and track, but which can be a problem if it hits our spacecraft. We get a daily conjunction report from JspOC any time something is predicted to pass within five kilometers. The problem for us is that we get about 400 of those in an average week. If you track back, that is about one per satellite per day, so the ability actually to do anything with all the information is pretty limited. The other problem is that with the error bounds associated with those reports, we are not going to be sure what to do. Even if we had a report of an impending direct collision, the error would be such that we might maneuver into a collision as well as move away from one. One of the things we would like to see down the road is the ability to tighten up the orbitology predictions and provide a little bit more useful data.
Campbell, John and T.S. Kelso. Examining Codes and Rules for Space. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, June 26, 2007. [ 6 quotes ] [ page 7 ]
U.S. Actively Pushing for Space Transparency in International Community
 
BUTTERWORTH: The United States government, in a recent letter that our ambassador sent to the Secretary General of the U.N., noted several of these things. For example, under the heading of Transparency and Confidence Building Measures, the U.S. publishes space weather forecasts and unclassified satellite tracking data, provides assistance in collision avoidance analysis for other nations’ human spaceflight missions, enforces national regulations to limit the probability of accidental collision in orbit, participates in bilateral exchanges on space policies and strategies, observes agreed procedures for the notification of re-entry of space nuclear power sources, and so on. And going beyond that, the United States has been working toward further assistance in collision avoidance for analysis for commercial and foreign satellite operators and additional work with foreign military space operators. So again, as with the debris, a lot of work has been done and more is continuing.
Campbell, John and T.S. Kelso. Examining Codes and Rules for Space. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, June 26, 2007. [ 6 quotes ] [ page 12 ]
Space Debris Collisions Probably Occur more Frequently than We Know
 
T.S. KELSO: In addition to providing satellite operators a quick way to see whether there are any predicted close approaches to their satellites over the coming week, SOCRATES also provides some insight into the magnitude of this problem. For example, for the SOCRATES report for the period from January 11th to the 18th, before the Chinese ASAT test was conducted, there were just over 7,000 times when some object was predicted to come within five kilometers of one of the nearly 2,800 payloads in Earth orbit. That’s over one thousand times a day. As of the report for June 25th, that number is now over 10,000 times a week, an increase of about 45 percent. Just over 2,500 of those close approaches were from pieces of debris from the Chinese ASAT test alone.

Many people will suggest that the risk to our satellites is being exaggerated by these numbers. After all, the conventional wisdom is that there have only been three confirmed collisions on orbit in fifty years of space operations, so what’s the fuss? Well, part of the problem lies with the word “confirmed.” Satellite conjunctions are not watched as they occur, but have to be gleaned from analysis of hundreds of thousands of observations of tens of thousands of objects when trying to figure out where a new unknown object may have come from. In reality, each object tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network is only observed for about a minute a day and the process of confirming a collision can take many months or years to resolve. Even if a small
Campbell, John and T.S. Kelso. Examining Codes and Rules for Space. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, June 26, 2007. [ 6 quotes ] [ page 16-7 ]
U.S. Reluctance to Share Surveillance Data Encourages other Countries to Withold Data
 
T.S. KELSO: The problem, of course, has more to do with data and data availability. As we just noted, there are thousands of objects which are tracked but for which no data is available to the public to perform the necessary analysis. The data that is available is of low accuracy, with positional uncertainties of hundreds or thousands of meters and the actual uncertainty is unknown. Higher accuracy data, along with the calculated uncer- tainty, is available within the U.S. government, but is not shared with satellite operators or the public. With access to the observations used to generate this data, current state- of-the-art orbit determination techniques could be used, in lieu of the decades-old leg- acy techniques from the 1970s and 1980s, to provide even more accurate orbital in- formation. It is likely that this information is also available from the space surveillance programs of other countries, as well. Instead, the U.S. government continues the prac- tice of withholding data for hundreds of satellites deemed important to U.S. national security, despite knowing for decades that amateur observers routinely generate their own data on these satellites as a hobby. The French have just reaffirmed this result in recent weeks, reporting that they are tracking classified U.S. satellites and asking the U.S. to withhold data on classified French satellites. The U.S. action of withholding data on its classified satellites is also encouraging other countries, such as Japan, to fol- low suit. Japan, a signatory to the UN Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space, which requires the registration of all space objects, has openly flouted their obligation for doing so for their own IGS satellites.
Campbell, John and T.S. Kelso. Examining Codes and Rules for Space. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, June 26, 2007. [ 6 quotes ] [ page 17 ]
Collabrative Space Surveillance Data Sharing would Enhance, not Undermine U.S. National Security
 
T.S. KELSO: It should be obvious to all parties, however, that our collective security and the protection of our orbiting space infrastructure from inadvertent collisions will require a collaborative framework to mitigate risk, much as we do today in civil aviation. Whether this is done through an open sharing of information, which would allow in- creased opportunity for innovation, or through some trusted international organization, the task is not difficult to accomplish, as shown by SOCRATES. Despite concern to the contrary, similar examples of collaborative data sharing, such as the Global Posi- tioning System or Google Earth, have not undermined national security. We have the opportunity to act now and avoid a future disaster in space. I hope we will not choose to sit back and wait for something serious and totally avoidable to happen before we decide to act.
Campbell, John and T.S. Kelso. Examining Codes and Rules for Space. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, June 26, 2007. [ 6 quotes ] [ page 18 ]
Releasing Space Surveillance Data would Help Improve Data Processing
 
T.S. KELSO: I am not necessarily advocating that we release information on classified satellites, but working with this community for a long time, I am well aware that many peo- ple are out there actually tracking satellites. As most of you know, the classified satel- lites we put up are not small and the amateur observers actually take it as a challenge to go out and find them themselves. I think it is actually rather naïve to assume that if amateur observers can do this as a hobby, that our potential adversaries can’t do the same as well and do it equally well. But the point is that there is a lot of data out there currently available through the U.S. Space Surveillance Network and if we had the ob- servations available to the public where they could actually innovate and use newer techniques, they could process more of the data. Part of the problem right now is that Air Force Space Command actually can’t make the associations between the observa- tions and a particular object. If I see you today and I see you tomorrow, I don’t neces- sarily know that that was you both days. So if I am trying to associate a track and fig- ure out where you are going over a particular period of time, I have to be able to say, “When I saw this person one day and I saw him the next day and the next day, those were all the same person and I think he was going from Washington to wherever.” If that information was actually released to the public, there are mathematical and astro- dynamic techniques available today which could actually process the data quicker. We need to look at what we can do and how we can do things, not by spending hundreds of millions of dollars, but how we can take what we already have and use existing tech- niques to try to do this better. If we could do that, we could do it more accurately. If I told you your satellite was predicted to have a piece of debris pass within a hundred meters, it would be one hundred meters plus or minus ten meters, which you might not be concerned about, as opposed to one hundred meters plus or minus a kilometer or two, which you would be concerned about because you don’t have any idea what that is telling you.
Campbell, John and T.S. Kelso. Examining Codes and Rules for Space. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, June 26, 2007. [ 6 quotes ] [ page 18-19 ]