Comparison of satellite manoeuvre detection methods based on timeline of orbit elements

Abstract

This paper proposes two innovative methods for detecting satellite manoeuvres by analysing a timeline of orbit elements. The first one makes use of a Linear Kalman Filter (LKF) to track the evolution of orbit elements and identify changes, while the second one refers to a particular manoeuvre strategy of geostationary satellites and detects in-plane orbit corrections by evaluating differences in mean longitude. Their detection performances are compared to those of already-existing techniques and tested, when applicable, for both Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) regimes. An optimization process is put in place to fairly confront different detection algorithms with distinct tuning parameters in order to ensure that every method is always providing its best detection performance. The defined loss function can also be used for a relative comparison of results, and this proves a better performance of the newly developed manoeuvre detection techniques.