GPU Accelerated Conjunction Assessment with Applications to Formation Flight and Space Debris Tracking
a.i. solutions, Lanham MD
Astrodynamics Specialist Conference (ASC) Hilton Head, 2013
@article{brown2013gpu,
title={GPU Accelerated Conjunction Assessment with Applications to Formation Flight and Space Debris Tracking},
author={Brown, Abel and Tichy, Jason and Demoret, Michael and Rand, David},
year={2013}
}
The primary purpose of conjunction assessment (CA) is to prevent the collision of objects in space. Typical collision scenarios involve satellites with space debris or a formation of satellites with each other. Users performing orbit propagation and CA on very large scales must judiciously moderate force model fidelity and/or acutely limit the number of objects being modeled, often due to computational limitations. Here we investigate massively parallel orbit propagation and CA utilizing general purpose graphical processing units (GPUs) which provide orders of magnitude performance increase over similar CPU based implementations. Applications to space debris tracking and formation flight are discussed.
October 7, 2013 by hgpu