The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Space Commerce has released a report outlining the findings and results from OSC’s Consolidated Pathfinder project that seeks to inform the development of the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS.
OSC said Thursday the report found that the TraCSS program needs to reassess assumptions about the benefits of “surge tracking” to offer additional information for conjunctions of interest.
The Consolidated Pathfinder project sought to inform OSC on contractual methods, metrics and structures that will facilitate the use of commercial space situational awareness capabilities to promote spaceflight safety in low Earth orbit and explore the commercial sector’s ability to maintain an LEO object catalog.
According to the paper, the Pathfinder Project maintained a major portion of the Department of Defense LEO space catalog, and prediction errors for objects that could be assessed were “substantially equivalent” between DOD and the pathfinder.
The report also highlighted the challenge associated with the divergence in collision risk assessments generated by pathfinder and DOD systems.
In about 12 percent of the serious cases, one system suggested a mitigation measure and the other platform recommended an outright dismissal of the serious event.
