Transparency and Accountability in Space Domain Awareness: Demonstrating ASTRIAGraph’s Capabilities with the United Nations Registry Data

Near-earth space is geopolitically and commercially contested, and in need of environmental protection. To achieve space safety, security, and sustainability, we are developing ASTRIAGraph (http://astria.tacc.utexas.edu/AstriaGraph/), a framework that enables monitoring, assessment, and verification of space actor behavior in the context of legal and policy instruments. In this presentation given at the 7th Annual Conference on Space Traffic Management 2021, we demonstrate how the ASTRIAGraph toolset can improve space management accountability for the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). We first describe the ASTRIAGraph data model and our information extraction and curation processes, as well as discuss methods for measuring and reporting the reliability of these processes. We then demonstrate several key features and analysis results using ASTRIAGraph with the United Nations space object registration data (https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/spaceobjectregister/index.html). For example, by combining fields from different sources such as the UN registration documents and USSPACECOM data, we can visualize space objects registered with the UNOOSA, identify ASO Launch States’ liability, assess trends in the registration patterns of these Launch States, and even compute ASO resolution amidst mismatched or missing different information from provided by the different sources. This data is then able to be analyzed and communicated through graphs and plots, which highlight the liability and compliance of a nation or organization, whether it is done by evaluating the lag (difference between the date of launch and the initial registration submission date) and plotting its spread for that given state or entity, or if you were to analyze their trends in compliance over time. In addition, using different registration information fields, users are able to query the ranking of Launch States in relation to registration promptness. These rankings, set between one and five stars, are first given to individual objects, but countries with many registered ASOs often have outliers with large registration lag. As such, the rankings are scaled higher for states which register larger numbers of ASOs to prevent undue punishment of these countries for their compliance. In this submission we include the video presentation and the conference abstract.