4th international congress KePASSA 2019

In April 2019 Logroño hosted for the second time the International Congress KePASSA (Key Topics in Orbit Propagation Applied to Space Situational Awareness); the particular venue within the city was La Rioja University. This was the fourth KePASSA congress, which takes in a wide range of issues to do with the application of orbital propagation to the safe management of space.

GMV presented three papers in this year's congress, dealing with initial orbit determination methods, covariance analysis for calculating collision probability and Flight Dynamics and Operations (FDO) tools.

In the first of these papers GMV explained a covariance estimation model based on statistical analysis of orbital update consistency. The method, which is applicable to any source of ephemerides, has been successfully applied to the objects of the U. S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM)'s Special Perturbations High-Accuracy Catalogue and to diverse external sources.

In the second paper GMV addressed diverse initial orbit estimation methods as necessary for identifying new objects and generating a catalogue of space objects in orbit.

Lastly, GMV presented matool (from the focussuite product family), gamo and initguess, three commercial tools using GMV's inhouse Semi-Analytical Propagator for Operations (SAPO).