Orbital Debris and Kessler Mitigation
Low Earth orbit already contains more than 36,000 tracked objects larger than 10 cm and on the order of 10⁶ untracked fragments between 1 mm and 10 cm. Each collision multiplies the population; the threshold past which collisions cascade faster than natural decay clears them is the Kessler syndrome. Once crossed, large bands of LEO become unusable for decades.
Swarm methods address three sub-problems: characterize the debris population at higher resolution than ground radar alone, track individual fragments continuously rather than by-sampling, and remove or deflect high-risk objects before cascades start.
Why swarms
Debris is distributed. A single bespoke servicer is expensive, specialized, and a single point of failure; a coordinated constellation of small servicing / sensing spacecraft gets geographic coverage, redundancy, and per-orbit access at far lower marginal cost.
The fault-tolerant coordination Arboria develops for million-agent interstellar swarms (ICCD paper) transfers directly. The same CRDT-based intent propagation that keeps mission coherence across light-minutes also keeps a 500-node debris observation constellation coherent despite line-of-sight limits, station-keeping divergence, and radiation-induced faults.
Research questions Arboria tracks
- Distributed debris catalog. A gossip-based catalog maintained across the constellation, replicated via CRDT, reconciled under intermittent inter-satellite links. Mirrors the intent-CRDT design from the ICCD paper.
- Active-removal target selection. Given limited delta-v budget across the swarm, which targets maximize Kessler-risk reduction per joule? A natural fit for HMA-style energy-aware auctions adapted from the planetary construction work.
- Collision-forecast horizon. How far in advance can a swarm
detect that an unmitigated collision would tip its local orbital
shell into Kessler cascade? Related to the criticality and
branching-ratio instruments in
gossamer.metrics.criticality. - Fault tolerance under radiation. Bit-flips, thruster faults,
and silent link failures are first-order. The self-healing topology
primitives in Gossamer
(
self_healing_topology.py) already cover partition recovery; radiation-induced Byzantine faults are an open direction.
Our position on dual-use
Debris-tracking swarms use the same coordination algorithms as orbital surveillance constellations. Arboria does not contribute directly to weaponizable orbital inspection or intercept, and we gate publications that could materially accelerate those capabilities. See principles.
Adjacent work
- ESA Clean Space, NASA ODPO, JAXA CRD2 — active-debris-removal programs.
- LeoLabs, Slingshot Aerospace — ground-based and hosted tracking networks.
- The NEDC (Near-Earth Debris Cascade) modeling literature — Bradley & Wein, Liou & Johnson, others.