The contribution of the past fragmentation events to the uncatalogued orbital debris population

In order to understand the origin of the artificial debris population in the 1 mm - 10 cm size range, we carried out a massive effort to estimate the contribution of past fragmentations events. Our research involved the development of a dedicated software code, CLDSIM, able to simulate the 117 catalogued fragmentation events in earth orbit occurred from 1961 to 1993, and to propagate the resulting debris clouds to a reference epoch (January 1, 1994). More than 10 millions of orbital debris with a mass larger than 1 mg were generated and about 6.8 millions resulted still in orbit at the reference epoch. The resulting data were used to investigate the properties of the uncatalogued population.