cascade

As the number of artificial satellites orbiting our planet grows, the likelihood of collisions increases, potentially triggering a cascade effect making certain orbits unusable.

cascade is a C++/Python library developed to propagate the evolution of large number of orbiting objects while detecting reliably close encounters and collisions. It is coded in modern C++20 with focus on the efficiency of the underlying N-body simulation with collision/conjunction detection. Its development was motivated to help conjunction tracking and collision detection of orbiting space debris populations.

Notable features include:

• a new and original collision detection algorithm based on high order Taylor expansions,

• guaranteed detection of all occuring collisions and conjunctions,

• high precision orbital propagation via Taylor integration,

• possibility to define custom dynamics,

• automatic usage of modern SIMD instruction sets (including AVX/AVX2/AVX-512/Neon/VSX),

• automatic multi-threaded parallelisation.

cascade is released under the MPL-2.0 license. The authors are Francesco Biscani and Dario Izzo (European Space Agency).

Installation

How to install the software and how to get started.

To installation

API Reference

The API reference contains a full description of the functions, classes and modules in cascade.

To the API reference

The collision algorithm

Where the collision algorithm is outlined.

To the collision algorithm

Tutorials:

• Quickstart
• Conjunctions
• Whitelists

Examples:

• 20 years of LEO - (collisions)
• One week of LEO - (conjunctions)
• Swarming Itokawa with cubesats

Utilities:

• The current LEO population
• A differentiable atmosphere
• The Cube approach