A Physics-Informed Statistical Learning Model for Long-Term Fragmentation Cloud Propagation

Abstract

This paper introduced a Hierarchical Generative Density Model (HGDM) for the long-term propagation of orbital fragmentation clouds. Validation against high-fidelity Monte Carlo simulations showed that the proposed surrogate accurately reproduces the dominant multidimensional structures of propagated clouds while consistently outperforming classical band-formation approximations based on independent angular variables. Accurate cloud reconstructions were obtained using only a few hundred to a few thousand propagated fragments, yielding reductions exceeding two orders of magnitude in computational cost and three orders of magnitude in storage requirements; future work will investigate its application to large-scale debris-environment evolution and collision-cascade simulations associated with the Kessler syndrome.