Check out the new paper published on Acta Astronautica by Andrea Muciaccia, Matteo Romano, Mirko Trisolini, and Camilla Colombo from Politecnico di Milano, on the reconstruction of in orbit fragmentation events.
The research work focuses on studying in-orbit fragmentation event from a long-term perspective, identifying and assigning debris fragments back to their parent(s) even months after the event. By using a semi-analytical propagator and mean Keplerian orbital elements, the model tracks the dynamical evolution of debris in low Earth orbit, exploiting certain properties of the dynamics of this orbital region to identify the epoch and parent(s) of fragmentation events.
Check out the OpenAccess paper published in Acta Astronautica here.