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Satellite Manoeuvring Detection – from Two-line Elements to Optical Tracking Observations

Presented by:

Yang Yang

Yang Yang

University of New South Wales, Sydney/The University of Adelaide

 

David Shorten

The University of Adelaide

 

Matthew Roughan

The University of Adelaide


The ability to recover the manoeuvre history of Resident Space Objects (RSOs), particularly for active satellites, is an important component in the lifetime analysis of these objects. It is of substantial interest to know whether a satellite has already reached its end of life and if its last manoeuvre has been performed in accordance with the mitigation guidelines enacted by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee. This work first investigates historical two-line elements (TLEs) for manoeuvre detection based on two types of methods: time series analysis of TLEs and residual analysis of TLE predictions. In particular, a consistency filter and a LULU filter have been developed to analyse the TLEs and predictions provided by the Simplified General Perturbations (SGP4) propagator. These methods were tested on multiple satellites in both low Earth orbit and geosynchronous Earth orbit. Results on these objects indicate that the new LULU filter method has favourable performance properties as compared to the other tested methods. Due to the limitations on TLEs, real-world optical tracking observations are being obtained and further processed in order to improve the RSO manoeuvre detection performance. New findings relating to this optical tracking data will also be presented in this work.

Category:

SSA

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