ESA's process for the identification and assessment of high-risk conjunction events

For ESA's automated routine conjunction event assessments which are embedded in a daily process with 7-day predictions, the handling of high-risk events is work-intensive. This shortcoming has been addressed by the implementation of a job scheduler, and automated procedures to facilitate the processing of tracking data, the update of ephemerides and covariances, and the update of conjunction geometries and collision risk estimates. The application of the upgraded software environment is illustrated through two exemplary, recent conjunction events of ENVISAT (02009A) with Russian Cosmos satellites: the conjunction event on 2008-Jan-09 19:00 (UTC) with the chaser object COSMOS-1624 (85006A), and the conjunction event on 2007-Nov-14 13:49 (UTC) with the chaser object COSMOS-1486 (83079A).