Validation of Satellite Lifetime Predictions at Leonid Space

Abstract

This paper validates Leonid Space's satellite lifetime prediction pipeline through a backtesting campaign of 878 deorbited satellites spanning six decades of spaceflight, showing that it accurately recreates their last year of flight. The pipeline combines a custom high-speed orbit propagator, ballistic coefficient estimation from on-orbit TLE data, atmospheric density corrections from data assimilation, custom space weather forecasts, and probabilistic Monte Carlo analysis. Validation proceeds in four steps that progressively remove the benefit of hindsight: starting from a "perfect knowledge" scenario using actual space weather data and ephemerides, we gradually replace historical data with contemporary predictions to arrive at a fully predictive scenario analogous to a deorbit prediction performed for a spacecraft flying today. These forecasts are scored using the continuously ranked probability score and root mean square calibration error, yielding a median one-year prediction accuracy of 3.9 days (1.1%) with perfect knowledge and 44.9 days (12.3%) in the fully predictive scenario. Solar flux forecasts contribute 89% of the variance in our predictions, dominating all other sources of error. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive backtesting of long-term satellite lifetime predictions that reports quantitative results for the fully predictive case, and it establishes a new framework for scoring solar cycle forecasts by grounding forecast accuracy in operationally-relevant satellite lifetime predictions.

arXiv comment30 pages, 16 figures, 3 tables. Revision 2.0