Space Situational Awareness
What I’m Working On
My recent research has focused on Space Situational Awareness (SSA): the challenge of tracking and predicting the motion of satellites and debris in Earth’s orbit. As of early 2026, there are over 12,000 active satellites in orbit, and licence applications have been filed for nearly 1.8 million more planned constellation satellites in the coming decades. The ability to predict where these objects will be is essential for collision avoidance and for protecting astronomical observations from satellite interference. This task is becoming increasingly important with such a huge increase in the number of objects in orbit.
Orbital propagation is at the heart of SSA. This refers to the task of predicting the future position and velocity of a space object from a known state. The most widely used propagation model is SGP4 (Simplified General Perturbations 4), which has been the community standard since its development in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the tools we currently rely on were designed for a much smaller orbital population, and there is growing recognition across the community that our computational infrastructure needs to be modernised to keep pace with the mega-constellation era. My recent work explores how modern computing hardware and software frameworks can be leveraged to dramatically improve the scalability of orbital propagation. Broadly, I am investigating whether techniques from the high-performance computing and machine learning communities can be adapted to solve astrodynamics problems at a scale that was previously impractical. A publication with full details and results is expected soon.
I have enjoyed meeting Edoardo Navarra (DC6, TU Delft) during his secondment and am looking forward to collaborating with Yiqing Wan (DC2, ICE-CSIC Barcelona) who has recently arrived at Polychord Ltd. in London.
Some Interesting Links
Here are a few resources I have come across recently:
- The growing satellite population — Jonathan McDowell maintains a comprehensive list
of planned constellation filings (among many other interesting lists):
https://planet4589.org/space/con/conlist.html - Impacts of mega-constellations on astronomy — A recent study by Borlaff et al. (2025)
explores how large satellite constellations affect astronomical observations.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09759-5 - CelesTrak — The go-to resource for publicly available satellite tracking data and the SGP4
algorithm:
https://celestrak.com
