APPLICATIONS OF PARALLEL-PROCESSING TO ASTRODYNAMICS

Parallel processing is being used to improve the catalog of earth orbi ting satellites and for problems associated with the catalog. Initial efforts centered around using SIMD parallel processors to perform debr is conjunction analysis and satellite dynamics studies. More recently, the availability of cheap supercomputing processors and parallel proc essing software such as PVM have enabled the reutilization of existing astrodynamics software in distributed parallel processing environment s. Computations once taking many days with traditional mainframes are now being performed in only a few hours. Efforts underway for the US N aval Space Command include conjunction prediction, uncorrelated target processing and a new space object catalog based on orbit determinatio n and prediction with special perturbations methods.