Long-Term Evolution of Debris Clouds in Geosynchronous Orbit

During the 1990s, it became clear that spacecraft and upper stages breakups contributed to the GEO debris environment while, recently, optical observations confirmed the presence of a large population of decimeter-sized particles, probably generated by a number of undetected explosions. Hoping to provide the optical observers with useful information and clues in identifying and characterizing the past explosion events near the geosynchronous region, a set of fragmentations in GEO of a typical communications spacecraft was simulated by assuming a reasonable range of the fragments' ejection velocities. Each debris cloud was propagated for 72 years, saving the results at intermediate time steps. The results - mainly represented as snapshots, at given post-explosion times, in the orbital elements' space - show the long-term evolution of each cloud of decimeter-sized debris as a function of the ejection velocity.