ESA Open Invitation to Tender: 1-11137
Open Date: 10/02/2022 09:23 CEST
Closing Date: 28/03/2022 13:00 CEST

The risk posed by the space debris environment as perceived by operators and analysts can be categorised into two parts. First there are the short-term risks, generally dealing with operating in congested environment (i.e. safety questions driven by the need to perform collision avoidance when passing near space debris and other operators, and orbit acquisition, maintenance, and disposal manoeuvres what could interfere with the operations of other actors). Secondly there are the long-term risks related to space sustainability or the lack thereof (i.e. the combined impact of operational practices on the long-term prevalence of space debris on-orbit). With an increasing amount of traffic and operators on-orbit, short-term risk assessment are being performed in an ad hoc fashion by individual stakeholders from narrow perspectives (e.g. fleet or individual mission operators, insurers, surveillance data providers, etc.). While various risk assessment methodologies share some commonalities through the expressions of collision risk as experienced by an individual mission operator, there is currently no commonly accepted methodology or process to underlie the individual applications in such a way that a common understanding can be achieved. The common intersection can be found by considering the effective concepts of operations as a driving parameter, accounting for the physical design of the mission, and establishing short-term traffic forecast and space surveillance models. The parameter space for an individual mission to consider when forecasting the future operational environment in terms of actors and space debris complex and diverse. A methodology to do such a forecast is currently onlyin place for the space debris environment, and subject to considerable uncertainty.The objective of this activity is thus to establish a unified procedure to assess the short-terms risks implied either by operations in a congested region (caused by space debrisand active missions) on an individual mission or fleet, and vice versa the effect of adding operations of a mission or fleet on actors already present in the same orbital region. The main users of such a procedure shall be risk owners and risk takers, direct (operator, launching state) or delegated (insurers)

Directorate: Directorate of Operations
Estabilishment: ESOC
ECOS Required: No
Classified: No
Price Range: 200-500 KEURO
Authorised Contact Person: Karol Pawel Sienkiewicz
Initiating Service: OPS-S
IP Measure: N/A
Prog. Reference: E/0717-03 – S2P P1 Space Debris
Tender Type: Open Competition
Open To Tenderers From: AT+CH+CZ+DE+DK+EL+ES+FI+GB+HU+NO+PL+PT+RO
Technology Keywords: 11-B-II-In-orbit Risks
Products Keywords: 4-A-4-Other