Collision avoidance maneuver planning tool

Satellite Collision Avoidance Maneuver (CAM) planning must take into account many factors. The risk of collision must be weighed against the risk of performing a maneuver. Fuel usage may shorten the satellite's operational lifetime. Mission degradation must also be considered if the satellite departs from its designed orbit. Return to nominal orbit may be an additional factor. This work describes the development and use of a MATLAB analysis tool that can perform parametric studies of single-axis and dualaxes maneuvers. The tool reads the object pair's positions, velocities, covariances, and physical sizes from Satellite Tool Kit (STK) and allows the user to modify the covariances and physical object sizes. MATLAB then creates collision-probability contour plots for a range of user-specified maneuver times and velocity changes. To reduce risk to an acceptable level, the user selects from a family of possible maneuvers. The candidate maneuver is then fed back into STK where further analysis can be performed to address other maneuver concerns.