Handling of conjuction warnings in Eumetsat flight dynamics

Metop is the space segment of the EUMETSAT Polar System (EPS), Europe's first polar orbiting operational meteorological satellite system. Since end of 2008, EUMETSAT has been receiving conjunction warning messages from JSpOC (Joint Space Operations Centre of the US Air-Force) for Metop-A based on the high accuracy orbits estimated by the US space surveillance network. EUMETSAT Flight Dynamics team started then developing a set of software prototypes and operational procedures to properly handle the conjunction warning messages to first identify conjunctions with unacceptable level of collision risk and then, if deemed necessary, compute the optimal maneuver permitting to reduce the collision risk to negligible values.The paper will present in detail the received data and the analysis performed to evaluate their suitability for operational use, the functionalities of the developed software prototypes, the status of the operational procedures and the results obtained for the most interesting operational cases.