Paul W. Schumacher, Jr., (Air Force Research Laboratory, Kihei, Hawaii) Christopher W. T. Roscoe and Matthew P. Wilkins, (Applied Defense Solutions, Columbia, Maryland)
Keywords: range bounds, range rate bounds, orbit element bounds, initial orbit determination, angles-based track initiation, Lambert solutions
Abstract:
As new optical sensors come online and more optical observations become available for space objects previously too small or too far away to detect, the space surveillance community is presented with the computationally challenging problem of generating initial orbit solutions (data association hypotheses) for a large number of short-arc line-of-sight observations. Traditional methods of angles-only orbit determination do not scale well to large problems because of the large number of combinations of observations that must be evaluated, since these methods require at least 3 observations for each initial orbit determination (IOD). On the other hand, if unique ranges are known (or assumed) then IOD can be performed with 2 observations using a Lambert-based approach. Furthermore, if angles and angle rates are available and range and range rate are both known (or assumed) then a complete orbit solution can be obtained for a single observation and the IOD computational load is only O(N).
Date of Conference: September 10-13, 2013
Track: Astrodynamics