Near-Earth Objects within the European Space Situational Awareness Programme
Koschny, Detlef¹; Bobrinsky, N.²; del Monte, L.^3
1ESA/ESTEC; ²ESA/ESOC; ³ESA/HQ

At the European Space Agency's Ministerial Council Meeting in Nov 2008, a new optional programme was accepted, called 'Space Situational Awareness programme preparation' or SSA in short. SSA is defined as a comprehensive knowledge, understanding and maintained awareness of the (i) population of space objects, of the (ii) space environment, and of the (iii) existing threats/risks. The duration of the programme will be 3 years (2009-2011); after that it could be decided to bring the actual programme into operation.

The main object categories contributing to the space environment are:

(1) Space Surveillance, including space-debris and satellites;

(2) Space Weather, i.e. radiation and plasma environment in space;

(3) Near-Earth Objects (NEOs).

The programme will fund activities related to these three domains, plus, as a support elements, activities related to setting up pilot data centers to support these domains and breadboards for surveillance radar.

For the domain of Near-Earth Objects, the Programme Plan identifies the following services to be provided:

- Tracking of all NEOs above a given size or risk threshold

- Determination of the orbit state, physical parameters (e.g. albedo, size, mass rotation period) and of associated uncertainties (co-variances)

- supply of orbit determination and prediction data of tracked NEOs in state or ephemeris format with known accuracy

- maintenance of available orbit data and physical characteristics of all known NEOs

- identification and ranking of NEO collision risks with the Earth

This presentation will give more background on the current status of this new programme.