A Randomized Approach to Space Debris Footprint Characterization

This paper studies the problem of characterizing the 4D (space cross time) region of the airspace that will be occupied by a space debris during an uncontrolled reentry, with the final goal of supporting the air traffic controllers in re-routing the air traffic when such an event occurs. The problem is formulated in terms of a chance-constrained optimization program, which is solved via a simulation-based method. The approach is comparatively evaluated against the so-called covariance propagation method recently proposed in the literature, emphasizing how some of the limitations of the latter method are overcome.