Space Surveillance: United States, Russia, and China

Abstract

With the launch of Sputnik, the United States and Russia began the process of tracking artificial satellites. This led to developments for observations, orbit determination, and catalog maintenance. The two countries followed somewhat different approaches to the same problem based on the available hardware and theoretical developments. As more sophisticated hardware and theories have been developed, progress has been made. However, new problems have developed because of debris, collision possibilities, and reentering objects. In addition, the range of spacecraft has increased to include geosynchronous orbits. In more recent times the European Space Agency (ESA) and China have become involved in various aspects of Space Surveillance. In 1994, the first meeting between United States and Russian experts in the field of space surveillance was held. Since then, seven more US Russia Space Surveillance Workshops have been held, with the addition of participants from ESA. Terry Alfriend has been the US Technical Chairman for many of these workshops. In 2009 a US China Space Surveillance Technical Interchange was held in Shanghai, China, and Terry was the US Technical Chairman.