The Space Security, Safety, and Sustainability (SSSS) Program at The University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) Strauss Center and the Cockrell School of Engineering, in partnership with the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), will hold the 8th annual Space Traffic Management conference, “Anthropogenic Environmental Impact and Assessment of Space Traffic on Space Operations and Implications for Climate Change Monitoring.” The conference will take place on Wednesday, March 02, 2022 and Thursday March 03, 2022, hosted at The University of Texas at Austin, USA (and also virtually via Zoom webinar). Experts from all over the world will gather to discuss and exchange on Space Traffic Management. Technical sessions will be devoted to several topics like Range Management, Airspace/Orbital Space Integration, Space Safety and Sustainability, Security, Space Environment Effects and Impacts and Related Issues.

More information available here.

Title: Laser torches, rulers, and fences for SST

The use of active optical and NIR illumination for SST and SSA is a relatively unexplored topic but can benefit from much recent development in astronomical instrumentation, especially from laser-assisted adaptive optics. Therefore in this talk I tackle some issues in what could be called "precision SSA" and how the specifc advantages of active illumination can be applied to solving these specific problems. The presentation will be an exploration of how these problems are difficult to address using existing instrumentation and so how new instrumentation could both refine and open new avenues in the parameter space. More precisely by using controlled illumination together with the knowledge of the variability allows key parameters to be directly measured by exploiting monochromaticity, polarisation control, spatial variability together with temporal variability. Of particular interest are measurements of the state vector of known RSOs, improved characterisation of poorly understood objects, rotation and pose estimation, and clustered object size distribution assessment. I will briefly touch on the difficulty of accessing various orbits and consider the particular challenges for distances much farther than LEO. In this vein, it is important to highlight the current roadblocks that prevent immediate implementation: the ideas are at TRL 2 and our immediate aims are to see how to push them to TRL 3 and TRL 4.