An SSA-to-ADR Uncertainty Propagation Pipeline for Tether-Net Debris Capture Mission Planning

Tether-net capture and Space Situational Awareness (SSA) have developed as separate disciplines, and capture-dynamics studies almost universally prescribe a deterministic target state. This paper proposes an end-to-end SSA-to-ADR uncertainty propagation pipeline treating tether-net capture as a probabilistic decision problem conditioned on observational data quality. Three stages are coupled: characterisation of the debris state covariance from TLE and photometric light-curve data; propagation of that covariance to the ejection epoch through a state transition matrix and drag-driven process noise; and construction of a capture probability surface over the ejection parameter space. Applied to Telkom-3 (NORAD 38744) over eleven epochs, the framework shows that SSA data quality governs capture performance through the validity horizon of the predicted state, not through terminal navigation accuracy. The two branches differ by two to three orders of magnitude: the translational horizon is eight to nine hours (8.0–9.3 h), whereas the rotational horizon falls from 115 to 23 s across three analysis epochs as the spin period shortens from 20.3 to 11.8 s. Capture probability at a 30 s observation-to-ejection latency drops correspondingly from 0.90 to 0.36. Photometric support must therefore be obtained minutes, not hours, before ejection, and the ejection timed to within about a second of the predicted favourable rotational phase.