Improvement of satellite conflict prediction reliability through use of the adaptive splitting technique

Abstract

Collision between satellites and debris is a rare event but with high financial consequences. This risk therefore has to be addressed carefully. To support the decision to start a collision avoidance maneuver, a dedicated tool to characterize the risk uncertainty is the probability of collision between the debris and the satellite. ¹ Crude Monte Carlo could be a way if it could cope with very small probabilities, say 10⁻⁶, within the available simulation budget and time. The methodology nowadays in use is a numerical integration made tractable by physical hypothesis and numerical approximation. ² We advocate the adaptive splitting technique, presented in Cérou et al., ³ as it avoids all the hypothesis needed for the numerical integration and clearly outperforms Crude Monte Carlo with respect to rare events. A direct comparison between Crude Monte Carlo and adaptive splitting technique approach is also given on real-life examples.