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

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.

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