Date of Award

5-12-2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Information Science

First Advisor

Daniel Berleant

Abstract

This research is on trend analysis of average satellite lifetimes. Preliminary research concerned which law (Moore’s Law or Wright’s Law) is better for predicting future satellite lifetimes based on their year of failure. While that work depended on the failure dates of satellites, in this research, using data for the launch dates of satellites, I compare those with their lifetimes to better understand the curves most suitable for determining trends in satellite lifespans and understanding better, based on launch year cohort, the lifetimes of satellites currently in orbit as well as those to be launched in the future. This research focuses on curve fitting to launch date vs. lifetime data, thus avoiding recency bias while using all available lifetime records. This requires working with half-life calculations as they change from one launch year to another. Mean lifetime calculation of satellites with launch year as the independent variable to measure the life expectancy of satellites is one option. A complication of this approach is that satellites may still be operating, making is harder to understand their lifetimes. Defining the half-life is a way of measuring or characterizing satellite lifetimes. This method avoids the complication that affects the means approach. Thus, a key problem focused on here is analyzing the half-lives of yearly satellite launch cohorts and using that to project future lifetimes of satellites by launch year, estimating conformance of satellite lifetime data to fitted curves that remove noise from the data to predict underlying (denoised) lifetimes of satellites by year of launch.

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