MOCAT-pySSEM: An open-source Python library and user interface for orbital debris and source sink environmental modeling

Abstract

The rapid increase in the number of Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites and reducing launch costs is likely to threaten the orbital environment. Understanding how this growth will affect the orbital debris population is paramount to designing effective policy, regulation and mitigation to protect the long term space sustainability of LEO. This will require interdisciplinary research of potential impacts, demanding contributions from social scientists, economists, astronomers, and alike. However, the complexity of astrodynamics and technical ability to build evolutionary space environment models often poses a significant barrier to interdisciplinary engagement, impeding critical research in this area. Previous models and tools have been developed, but are often not open-source nor accessible. MIT Orbital Capacity Assessment Tools (MOCAT) was developed to provide an open-source evolutionary space environment modeling capability to the broader space and policy communities, featuring both a computationally intensive but higher fidelity full-scale Monte Carlo model (MOCAT-MC) and a lower fidelity but significantly faster source sink evolutionary modeling framework, (MOCAT-SSEM). Here we continue this journey by presenting a Python version of the source sink tool, MOCAT-pySSEM with an accompanying web application (featuring cloud-hosted computation) to support future interdisciplinary research.