Geoinformation modeling of near-Earth space: current tasks and future prospects

Abstract

The history of space exploration and current near-Earth space objects population are described in this paper. Moreover, the necessity of GIS technologies application to solve space industry tasks and the development of corresponding GIS are explained. The legal and regulatory issues of the near-Earth space GIS project development are touched upon, as well as the classification and options for the target purpose of the system. The stages of technological search and development are presented, as a result of which the Cesium library was chosen. Based on the results of discussions, a decision is made to expand the limits of the modeling space to the outer boundaries of the Hill sphere. In addition, it is noted that the objects of geoinformation modeling of near-Earth space should be not only space objects, considered as three-dimensional, but also the physical fields of the Earth. The results of performance evaluation experiments on SGP4/SDP4 based software tool for predicting space objects position are shown, and the accuracy of this model itself is assessed by reference GPS coordinates. Possible ways of industry tasks that could be solved using the developed near-Earth space GIS are presented; promising routes of the future development including DISCOS data are indicated.