Most of the human-made objects in space are orbiting the Earth, this is not bound to change soon; however, in the last years there has been a growing interest in missions beyond the Earh. The Cislunar environment (i.e., volume of space influenced by the Earth and/or Moon) has become a particularly enticing region for future missions such as the ones within the Artemis programme, one of its goals being to test technologies before being able to go even further: Mars. This means that in the coming years, the number of human-made objects beyond Earth’s orbit is going to increase.

Within this context, and with the aim of maintaining a safe and sustainable space, the European Space Agency (ESA) wants to have a tool capable of assessing compliance with international requirements related to space debris for missions beyond Earth. To that end, ESA has awarded a contract to a Consortium led by GMV to develop this activity, with the collaboration of MAITY Space and HTG. The project started mid-December 2024 and is expected to have a total duration of one year and a half.

The dynamical behaviour beyond Earth is highly non-linear and chaotic, so linearisation and some other assumptions, valid for the near-Earth environment, are no longer a valid option. This poses challenges in the common computations within the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) domain and requires different approaches than the ones used in the near-Earth environment. The main goal of this project is to study the different aspects of interplanetary return trajectories, and, with that knowledge, develop an integrated analysis software toolbox to address mitigation compliance assessments associated with interplanetary return trajectories. This toolbox will support several analyses related to space safety, including the probability of collision within protected the regions, i.e., Earth orbit regions of special interest: Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO), as well as high-speed re-entries and fragmentation events.

GMV strengthens its compromise with sustainable space with this project, expanding the domain of SSA beyond Earth. As the prime contractor, GMV leads the activity, including the coordination of the activities among the other contractors. GMV’s role includes the study of the dynamics of these intricate trajectories, the tracking capabilities and the uncertainties associated with their quantification and propagation, and the implementation of these analyses in the development of the toolbox for ESA.

This is another extraordinary achievement for GMV, further solidifying the company's reputation as a dominant force in the Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) & Space Traffic Management (STM) domains, positioning us at the forefront of industry advancements.