Application of average contamination sources for the prediction of space debris environment.

The conventional approach to prediction of technogeneous space contamination is based on modeling space debris (SD) generation as a result of satellite launches, technological operations and spacecraft breakups. The technique of SD environment prediction, developed in Russia, uses the averaged description of contamination sources: the average number of annually generated objects of different size on orbits with various altitudes, eccentricities and inclinations. The advantages and limitations of two above-mentioned approaches are considered in the report. The conclusion is justified, that the averaged approach is quite acceptable under condition of high a priori uncertainty of the known data about contamination sources. Its main advantage consists in a smaller number of parameters to be updated, which occurs to be especially important when the scope of experimental data is small. The averaged description of contamination sources was used in the computer model for Space Debris Prediction and Analysis developed in Russia (the SDPA-model).