Matteo Romano (Université de Namur)

Title:
Studying the topology of the space population using networks

Abstract:
With more than 23.000 tracked objects orbiting Earth, satellite operators find themselves dealing with hundreds of conjunctions at risk of collision per week, situation only getting worse due to the increasingly frequent satellite launches in recent years. Within the WALSAT project, in collaboration with the industrial partner Aerospacelab, we aim to represent the space population as a network in order to exploit its properties to study the topology of the population as a whole. The catalogue objects are represented as nodes and links between them are established whenever a close encounter occurs over a given time window. The resulting network is then analysed in terms of properties such as degree, centrality, and clustering to identify the most dangerous objects. Moreover, by weighting the links using the collision probability or the associated risk, we can identify the most sensitive orbital regions and the objects contributing the most to the overall collisional risk.

The seminar will take place in room S08 at the Faculty of Sciences