I Built a Space Debris Collision Assessment Engine in Python

Space around Earth is getting crowded. Thousands of active satellites share orbit with millions of debris fragments — some no bigger than a bolt, yet moving at 7–8 km/s. At those speeds, even a small collision can destroy a satellite. That reality is what pushed me to build a Space Debris Conjunction Assessment Engine. Not as a theoretical exercise — but as a computational system that analyzes orbital data and evaluates potential close approaches between objects in orbit. The Idea The goal of the project was simple in concept but complex in implementation: Given two orbital objects, estimate the risk of collision. To do that, the system needs to: Process orbital parameters from satellite datasets Compute relative motion between objects Estimate Time of Closest Approach (TCA) Evaluate minimum separation distance Flag potential conjunction events What sounds straightforward quickly turns into a computational physics problem. Architecture of the Engine The engine evolved into a two-stage