Correlation of Observations and Orbit Recovery Considering Maneuvers

Abstract

Optical tracklets collected after or during a maneuver phase cannot be directly associated to any cataloged object. The observations do not provide enough information for an independent orbit determination. Thus, the new orbit remains uncertain before collecting any additional measurements. Two methods for the correlation and orbit recovery are presented. First, the solution space after the maneuver is bounded using an admissible region. Second, the historic maneuver data of each object is characterized to compute the association likelihood and predict the most likely state after a maneuver. The performance of the presented approaches is demonstrated using data of EUMETSAT satellites.