ESA Open Invitation To Tender [FR] AO8347
Open Date: 29/06/2015
Closing Date: 14/09/2015

Status: ISSUED
Reference Nr.: 15.197.08
Prog. Ref.: General Studies
Budget Ref.: E/0600-00 – General Studies
Special Prov.: BE+DK+FR+DE+IT+NL+ES+SE+CH+GB+IE+AT+NO+FI+PT+GR+LU+CZ+RO+PL+CA
Tender Type: C
Price Range: 200-500 KEURO
Establishment: ESAHQ
Directorate: Directorate of Technical & Quality Manag
Department: System, Software & Technology Department
Division: Future Prep. & Strategic Studies Off.
Contract Officer: O’Sullivan, Margaret
Last Update Date: 29/06/2015
Update Reason: Tender issue

Since 1990, small satellites are being employed in space, mainly for demonstration of technologies. In addition to this trend, in the past few years there has been a significant increase on the number of small satellites being launched (with more than 70 new small satellites deployed each year). Furthermore, plans have been announced to deploy and maintain constellations with a big number (between 500 and 5000) of medium size satellites (between 100kg and 500kg) in order to provide fast internet to any region of the world. The effect of such a big constellations on the future space environment evolution has not been analysed yet. The space debris environment evolution models of the different space agencies, which have been used to generate the IADC mitigation guidelines, use the launch traffic model from the past to reproduce the launches in the future. The effect of the recent and future trends of launches of small satellites on the future space environment evolution has not been studied in depth and should be addressed in this study. This work will require the use of an environment evolution model taking into account future launch and explosion traffic, mitigationactions and remediation actions. This must take into account mutual collisions among the objects of the population and the feedbackofthe resulting new objects into the simulation. The objectives of this study shall be: To review the existing work on environment predictions for small satellites and for big constellations; To review the existing work on the evolution of the small satellite population (market analysis, trends,…); To review the available information on the proposed big constellations; To select representative evolution traffic models covering both the small satellites and the big constellations (separately, but also in a combined way); To setup the required simulation environment; To analyse the evolution of the environment subject to the different traffic models, with different implementations of the mitigation guidelines; To analyse the time dependent flux on the most frequently used operational orbits; To analyse the impact of the big constellations on the evolution of the future environment; To analyse the impactof the small satellites on the evolution of the future environment.

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