English

Conjunction Data Messages for Space Collision Behave as a Poisson Process

Machine Learning 2023-03-28 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Space debris is a major problem in space exploration. International bodies continuously monitor a large database of orbiting objects and emit warnings in the form of conjunction data messages. An important question for satellite operators is to estimate when fresh information will arrive so that they can react timely but sparingly with satellite maneuvers. We propose a statistical learning model of the message arrival process, allowing us to answer two important questions: (1) Will there be any new message in the next specified time interval? (2) When exactly and with what uncertainty will the next message arrive? The average prediction error for question (2) of our Bayesian Poisson process model is smaller than the baseline in more than 4 hours in a test set of 50k close encounter events.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.15074,
  title  = {Conjunction Data Messages for Space Collision Behave as a Poisson Process},
  author = {Francisco Caldas and Cláudia Soares and Cláudia Nunes and Marta Guimarães},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.15074},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Submitted to EUSIPCO '23. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2105.08509

R2 v1 2026-06-28T09:35:12.252Z