SSASIM: An Earth-Orbiting Objects Catalogue Maintenance Simulator

The comprehensive knowledge of the population of man-made space objects is one of the main aims of the Space Situational Awareness (SSA). This knowledge is achieved through the execution of Space Surveillance operations aimed to detect, correlate and characterize these objects as well as to assess their orbital evolution. The information gathered and computed for the detected space objects needs to be catalogued, maintained and regularly updated.GMV has developed SSASIM for prototyping the orbit evolution cataloguing activities as a precursor of the envisaged operational Tracking & Survey Data Centre part of the future European Space Situational Awareness System.Exhaustive reuse of well-known and proven ESOC software (ODIN and NAPEOS) and of the focusSuite framework has been performed in order to maximize its reliability, robustness and expandability. This paper describes the catalogue maintenance process performed by SSASIM.