Check out the new paper published on Acta Astronautica by Andrea Muciaccia, Lorenzo Giudici, Francesca Letizia, Mirko Trisolini, Juan Luis Gonzalo and Camilla Colombo on the definition of a metric for space sustainability.
The research work focuses on the investigation of a risk metric to assess the impact of missions on the space environment, studying the consequences of in-orbit fragmentations. Four possible formulations of the severity of a fragmentation are proposed, starting from the work done by Francesca Letizia (ECOB), along with an investigation of how the inclusion of a large constellation affects the original definition of the metric.
Check out the OpenAccess paper published in @acta astronautica here: