Local Debris Congestion in the Geosynchronous Environment with Population Augmentation

Forecasting of localized debris congestion in the geostationary (GEO) ring is performed to investigate how frequently near-miss events occur for every longitude slot at GEO. A parallelized propagation routine is used to propagate the current resident space object (RSO) population at GEO forward in time, and representative augmentation of this population is implemented to simulate congestion in "business-as-usual" launch traffic, with and without mitigation at end-of-life. Congestion forecasting for a 50- year time frame is presented to illustrate the need for both appropriately-executed mitigation and active remediation measures at GEO.