Realistic Sensor Tasking Strategies

Abstract

Efficient sensor tasking is a crucial step in building up and maintaining a catalog of space objects at the highest possible orbit quality. Sensor resources are limited; sensor location and setup (hardware and processing software) influence the quality of observations for initial orbit determination or orbit improvement that can be obtained. Furthermore, improved sensing capabilities are expected to lead to an increase of objects that are sought to be maintained in a catalog, easily reaching over 100’000 objects. Sensor tasking methods hence need to be computationally efficient in order to be successfully applied to operational systems, and need to take realistic constraints, such as limited visibility of objects, time-varying probability of detection and the specific capabilities in software and hardware for the specific sensors into account. This paper shows a method to formulate sensor tasking as an optimization problem and introduces a new method to provide fast and computationally efficient real time, near optimal sensor tasking solutions. Simulations are preformed using the USSTRATCOM TLE catalog of all geosynchronous objects. The results are compared to state of the art observation strategies.