LADDS - Large-scale Deterministic Debris Simulation

Codebase for the ARIADNA Study between TU Munich and ESA's Advanced Concepts Team. A more detailed project description can be found on the Advanced Concepts Team's webpage.

Requirements

• CMake >= 3.19
• make (build-essentials, or equivalent)
• A C++17 Compiler (recommended: gcc >=7 or clang >=8, only clang-10 is tested)
• OpenMP >= 4.5
• git (for fetching dependencies)
• TBB (Breakup-Model needs this)

Optional

• Doxygen
• clang-format-9
• MPI

Important Dependencies

The following codes play an important role in this project. They are downloaded and managed via CMake at configure time:

• AutoPas
• NASA Breakup Model
• Orbit Propagator

Building

mkdir build && cd build
CC=clang CXX=clang++ ccmake ..  # Set Variables according to your preferences
make -j12                       # choose number according to your CPU

Testing

Testing is done with help of GoogleTest, which is downloaded by CMake.

cmake -DLADDS_BUILD_TESTS=ON .. # Should be enabled by default
make ladds_tests -j12
ctest -j12

Running

The simulation requires one yaml file as argument which specifies the necessary options.

./ladds myInput.yaml

or with MPI and e.g. 42 ranks:

mpiexec -n 42 ./ladds myInput.yaml

For an overview of all possible options see cfg/default_cfg.yaml. Most parameters have a default value which is used when they are left unspecified. The full configuration, including defaulted values, is shown in the console output when executing the simulation.

Checkpoints

LADDS features a checkpoint mechanic where a simulation can be restarted from an HDF5 file. To create a checkpoint the simulation just needs to write an HDF5 file. This is done via the following part of the configuration:

io:
  csv:
    fileName: initial_population.csv # = input
  hdf5:
    fileName: checkpointFile.h5 # = output
    writeFrequency: 100 # how often LADDS writes to HDF5

The next simulation, which starts from checkpointFile.h5 then needs to have the following:

io:
  hdf5:
    checkpoint:
      file: checkpointFile.h5 # = input AND output
      iteration: 99 # Iteration where to start from. Will use last if not given.
    writeFrequency: 100 # how often LADDS writes to HDF5

LADDS will append any new data to the checkpoint file. This will load iteration 99 (which is the 100th iteration) from the checkpoint and start the simulation with iteration 100. Note that no io/csv/fileName or differing io/hdf5/fileName should be provided when loading a checkpoint.

IMPORTANT: All file paths are relative to the data directory!

Simulating Breakups

The code is capable to simulate fatal collisions between two bodies via the NASA Breakup Model. This feature can be activated in the yaml file via:

sim:
  breakup:
    enabled: true

Calibrating AutoPas

By default, some robust but static configuration is set by LADDS. You can change this by specifying the algorithmic options AutoPas is allowed to use in the YAML file. If more than one configuration can be built from these options AutoPas will tune over them at run time.

Enable Auto Tuning

If you are unsure what algorithmic configuration you want to use for AutoPas just let AutoPas guide you. For this, the following needs be activated in the yaml file:

autopas:
  tuningMode: true

In this mode, the simulation is only executed for one AutoPas tuning-phase. At the end of this phase, a copy of the full configuration is created, which contains the algorithm configuration that AutoPas deemed to be the fastest. This configuration can then be used to run the actual simulation at optimal speed.

Analyzing AutoPas Configurations

AutoPas can be compiled to dump information about the performance of the algorithms it uses to .csv files. For this set the CMake variables: AUTOPAS_LOG_TUNINGDATA=ON and AUTOPAS_LOG_TUNINGRESULTS=ON.

• AutoPas_tuningData.csv contains the timing data of all samples AutoPas collected.
• AutoPas_tuningResults.csv contains the result of each tuning phase.

Processing TLE Input

Data on current satellites etc. is often found online in the TLE format. We include a Jupyter notebook which can be used to process TLE data with pykep to create and analyze suitable datasets. Detailed instructions can be found in the notebook in notebooks/Data Processing.ipynb.

Generating and including Constellations

Satellite constellations (e.g. Starlink, OneWeb) are usually described by a list of orbital shells. An orbital shell is described by a 4-tuple with information about altitude, inclination, number of planes, and number of satellites per plane. We provide a notebook notebooks/ConstellationGeneration/ConstellationGeneration.ipynb that can be used

How constellation satellites are inserted into the simulation

The insertion of a constellation takes as long as specified by the duration parameter in the respective .yaml file. The time it takes to insert one shell of a constellation depends on the percentage of satellites the shell contributes to the constellation. Satellites of each orbital shell are inserted plane by plane and linearly over time.

Including the constellation data in simulation (io section):

In the configuration file for the simulation, include the constellation(s) by defining the following fields:

• constellationList: Semicolon (;) separated list of constellation names. E.g. Astra;Starlink;OneWeb
• constellationFrequency: Number of timesteps between constellation insertions.
• constellationCutoff: Satellites are inserted with a delay, if there is an object within this range.
• altitudeSpread: [km] Three times the standard deviation of the normal distribution describing the imprecision of orbital insertion. ~99.74% of satellites deviate by less than this value from the mean altitude.

Output

LADDS has multiple options for output that can be (de)activated mostly independent of each other via YAML. See cfg/default_cfg.yaml for relevant options.

VTK

Particles

.vtu files in XML/ASCII layout that can be loaded into Paraview for visualization. They contain all particles positions and (most of) their properties. There will be one vtu file per rank and visualization step, as well as one pvtu file per step, which links to all files of the same step.

MPI Decomposition

If the selected MPI decomposition supports it, vts and pvts files are created similar to those for particles. These however, contain information to visualize the spacial MPI decomposition in Paraview.

HDF5

A single .h5 containing particle and conjunction data from a full simulation run with the following structure:

/
├── CollisionData
│   └── <IterationNr>
│       └── (Dataset) Collisions
│           idA idB distanceSquared
├── EvasionData
│   └── <IterationNr>
│       └── (Dataset) Evasions
│           idA idB distanceSquared
└── ParticleData
    └── <IterationNr>
    │   └── Particles
    │       ├── (Dataset) IDs
    │       ├── (Dataset) Positions
    │       │   x y z
    │       └── (Dataset) Velocities
    │           x y z
    └─── (Dataset) ConstantProperties
         id cosparId mass radius bcInv activityState

Collision and evasion data is tracked every iteration, particle data only in intervals that are defined in the YAML file. ConstantProperties contains properties of all particles that existed over the course of the simulation. Due to burn ups or breakups the number of particles in any iteration might differ but ids are unique! To keep file size reasonable compression is supported.

If MPI is used one HDF5 file per rank is written. ParticleData contains the information of all particles that at any point passed through this rank. CollisionData contains all collisions that happened in this rank. EvasionData contains all evasions (i.e. an active particle evading a conjunction) that happened in this rank.

CSV

If HDF5 output is disabled entirely, collision and evasion data is written in a .csv file in ASCII layout.

Related ESA's open source software Projects

• [cascade]: Long-term fast and deterministic propagation of debris populations.
• [dsgp4]: Differentiable SGP4 orbital propgator.
• [NASA-breakup model]: NASA's breakup model.