It’s not nearly as easy as you’d think in the case of rocks being dropped from the moon. The crux of the issue is that:
We are not well equipped for space situational awareness in cislunar space
There are many orders of magnitude more volume to observe in cislunar space than in the space below the GEO belt
The previous two bullets mean it’s difficult to find a non cooperative target once you lose it and the precision of any observations is poor. The sheer volume of space that need to be observed makes this issue nearly impossible to fix.
Trajectories in cislunar space are highly chaotic due to multi-body effects. Combine this with poor estimates of position and velocity, and our predictions of the future diverge rapidly from truth when propagating cislunar orbits.
The Tl;dr is that we can’t effectively track non-cooperative objects in cislunar space over any extended period of time.
Sure! AFRL released a document called a primer on cislunar space targeted towards military personnel that does a great job of explaining it in easily understood terms.
It’s not nearly as easy as you’d think in the case of rocks being dropped from the moon. The crux of the issue is that:
The Tl;dr is that we can’t effectively track non-cooperative objects in cislunar space over any extended period of time.
This is fascinating, could you perhaps link to some reading on the topic?
Sure! AFRL released a document called a primer on cislunar space targeted towards military personnel that does a great job of explaining it in easily understood terms.
Thank you!