Conjunction assessment · low Earth orbit

Space is big. Your orbit isn't.

SIDEREAL screens every object you fly against the full public catalogue and 40,000 tracked fragments — and tells you which burn to plan, seventy-two hours before the close approach instead of eight.

Closest approach logged this week · STARLINK-4682 / COSMOS-2251 DEB

0.412km

Four hundred and twelve metres, at a closing speed of 14.1 km/s. Nobody manoeuvred. Nobody had time to.

One event, seventy-two hours

Conjunction 2024-0917-B · reconstructed from public catalogue data

Miss distance 51.800km Pc 1 : 940,000

  1. T− 72:00

    51.800 kmmiss · Pc 1 : 940,000

    SIDEREAL flags it. The screening runs against all 34,120 catalogued objects every 90 minutes. This one crosses the volume threshold three days out, while a 0.4 m/s burn still fixes it.

  2. T− 48:00

    38.400 kmmiss · Pc 1 : 640,000

    The covariance tightens. Two more radar passes land. The uncertainty ellipsoid shrinks from 3.1 km to 900 m — and the miss distance drops with it. This is the moment most tooling still says "monitor".

  3. T− 18:00

    14.900 kmmiss · Pc 1 : 9,400

    Threshold crossed. Probability of collision passes 1 in 10,000 — the manoeuvre line for every operator we work with. SIDEREAL has already solved the burn: 0.6 m/s retrograde, fourteen minutes of thrust.

  4. T− 08:00

    4.100 kmmiss · Pc 1 : 5,200

    Where you'd normally find out. The standard conjunction data message arrives here. Eight hours to confirm, plan, and coordinate the ground pass — on a spacecraft that talks to you twice an orbit.

  5. T− 00:00

    0.412 kmmiss · Pc 1 : 2,600

    Closest approach. You either moved, or you spent the pass watching telemetry with your hands flat on the desk.

The hard part was never the maths. It was the lead time.

Everyone can propagate an orbit. Almost nobody can tell you, early enough to matter, which of the eleven things on your screen this week is the one that will actually need propellant.

Mechanism

Three things we do that a screening service doesn't

  1. 01

    We screen on your ephemeris, not the public one

    Public two-line elements carry kilometres of along-track error by day three. We ingest your operational ephemeris over CCSDS OEM and screen against a covariance we actually trust — which is what moves a warning from eight hours to seventy-two.

    72 h median lead time, against 8.4 h for CDM-only workflows

  2. 02

    We solve the burn, not just the warning

    Every alert ships with a manoeuvre: delta-v, direction, thrust window, propellant cost, and the two follow-on conjunctions that manoeuvre would create. You approve it or you don't. You don't rebuild it in a spreadsheet at 03:00.

    0.4–1.2 m/s typical resolving burn when caught at T−72

  3. 03

    We rank the week, so most alerts get ignored on purpose

    An operator flying sixty spacecraft sees four hundred conjunction messages a week. Four matter. SIDEREAL sorts by probability against your own manoeuvre threshold and puts the other 396 somewhere you never have to look.

    99.1% of screened events closed without operator action

A week on the console

Seven days, sixty spacecraft, four things that mattered.

  1. Mon

    63

    events screened

    All below threshold. Nothing reaches a human.

  2. Tue

    71

    events screened

    One watch item opened on SIDR-14. Auto-closed at 19:40 on a fresh radar pass.

  3. Wed

    1

    manoeuvre recommended

    SIDR-09 against FENGYUN-1C debris. 0.6 m/s retrograde, burn window 04:12 UTC. Approved in ninety seconds from a phone.

  4. Thu

    58

    events screened

    Post-burn re-screen clean. No follow-on conjunctions created.

  5. Fri

    2

    watch items

    Both on the same derelict upper stage. Held for Monday's radar pass rather than spending propellant on a maybe.

  6. Sat

    66

    events screened

    Quiet. The system does not page you for quiet.

  7. Week

    421

    screened · one burn

    Total operator time spent on collision avoidance: nineteen minutes.

The same event, screened early

Same conjunction · screened at T−72 · 0.6 m/s applied

0.412km

Four hundred and twelve metres becomes eleven point four kilometres, for less propellant than a routine station-keeping burn.

Pricing

Per spacecraft, per month. No screening fees.

Single asset

$1,400/month

One spacecraft, full screening cadence, solved manoeuvres, and 24/7 escalation to a human being.

  • 90-minute screening cycle
  • OEM and TLE ingest
  • Manoeuvre solutions included
  • Email and SMS escalation
Book a screening

Most operators

Constellation

$640/spacecraft/month

Ten or more spacecraft. Fleet ranking, shared manoeuvre budget, and follow-on conjunction modelling across the whole plane.

  • Everything in Single asset
  • Fleet-wide ranking and triage
  • Follow-on conjunction modelling
  • API and webhooks into your ops stack
  • Named analyst, 15-minute response
Book a screening

Sovereign

Bespoke

Air-gapped deployment, restricted catalogue ingest, and your own analysts trained on the manoeuvre pipeline.

  • On-premise or sovereign cloud
  • Restricted catalogue support
  • Custom manoeuvre policy engine
  • Operator training programme
Talk to us

Send us one week of ephemeris.

We'll screen it against the full catalogue and send back every conjunction you had, what we would have told you, and when. No integration and no call required to see it. Most operators find at least one event they never heard about.

Typical turnaround: two working days.