Compliance of disposal orbits with the French Space Operations Act: The Good Practices and the STELA tool

This paper gives an overview of the Good Practices for orbit propagation in LEO, GEO and GTO as well as a brief description of the STELA tool. It explains the specificities of GTO and the need for a statistical approach, through a Monte-Carlo campaign of orbital propagations. Then, it raises the question of the statistical convergence and proposes a methodology to estimate a confidence interval for the results. Finally, special cases consisting of typical GTO are treated.