Risk of collision for satellites in different configurations of mega constellations

Several projects of large constellations have been proposed for the next years for communication purposes, like global internet access, Internet of Things, or for Earth observation. If OneWeb, Starlink, and Telesat are already scheduled, a lot of companies are now developing new projects at different altitudes. In this paper, we propose to investigate the collision risk for each referenced constellation. For this purpose, we compute the orbit evolution of the constellation during the operational life and we apply the CUBE algorithm to evaluate the collision rate with the space debris population, and we show the variation of the risk as a function of the proposed configuration.