BACARDI 2.0 Backbone Catalogue of Relational Debris Information
In recent years, BACARDI, the Backbone Catalogue of Relational Debris Information, was developed and put into operation. However, as the software has significantly evolved and some components are no longer supported, it was decided to develop a new version, BACARDI 2.0, from scratch.
Use cases were created, system requirements were derived, and a planning document was drafted, focusing on maintainability, clarity, user-friendliness, and performance. While the architecture has changed, the core functionalities remain, including correlation of measurements to objects, orbit improvement, initial orbit determination, orbit prediction, and cataloging of new objects. A new method for correlating measurements with known objects has been invented, tested, and implemented. Additionally, the concept of supporting conjunction assessments has been introduced, filtering potential collisions through a selection process. In cases of very close approaches, a warning is generated and sent out, allowing for further analysis and potentially leading to evasive maneuvers. Short- and long-term reentry predictions for objects are also performed. All of this can be conducted in near real-time by applying parallelization and high-performance computing techniques. A visualization of the objects contained in BACARDI is available at https://bacardi.dlr.de/viewer.html.