Kittiwake Debris Tracker

Two centuries of launches have left Earth orbit cluttered. Kittiwake is Halcyon's contribution to cleaning it up: three satellites in a 780 km sun-synchronous orbit carrying wide-field radars that detect fragments as small as 2 centimetres. The catalogue currently follows 1.3 million objects.

Every week the catalogue is ranked by collision risk, and the top targets are passed to Basilisk Salvage Tug crews. Each two-pilot tug can grapple and deorbit or recycle several large derelicts per sortie, and Kittiwake confirms the removal afterwards.

Conjunction warnings are free for any operator. Shuttle lines, ground campuses and partner fleets subscribe to the feed so their flight crews can plan avoidance burns hours in advance. The full catalogue is released under CC-BY-4.0.

The orbit-determination code is open source and the team welcomes help, especially on fragmentation modelling after collisions. In practical terms, users can download orbital debris catalogue, conjunction warnings and fragment size estimates free of charge under CC-BY-4.0, with source and documentation at https://git.halcyon.example/kittiwake. Halcyon's open data programme treats this resource as shared infrastructure, much like a lighthouse: it costs little to run once built, and it makes the whole solar system safer and cheaper to work in. Issue reports, documentation fixes and translations are all valued contributions.