Prediction Accuracy Analysis from Orbital Elements Generated for a New Space Object Catalogue
Abstract
The Space Environment Research Centre (SERC) is building a space object catalogue to provide accurate and reliable orbital information for a number of applications. Orbital elements are generated by fitting optical and laser tracking data from tracking assets located in Australia.
This paper reports on the orbital prediction accuracy achieved. The data processing and fusion methodologies are described that improve accuracy and ensure the orbit determination process is not corrupted by erroneous data. Additional information from the data is also obtained by estimating the rates of change of the observation arcs. When the angles and range observation data are fused, the accurate 6-dimensional data is used to generate state vectors directly from the observations. The orbit prediction improvements form a critical component of a Conjunction Assessment capability that is being developed and the progress of the automatic generation of orbit elements is reported here.- Publication:
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Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance (AMOS) Technologies Conference
- Pub Date:
- 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017amos.confE..17B
- Keywords:
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- Debris;
- orbit prediction;
- optical tracking;
- laser tracking;
- catalogue