Initial Orbit Determination of Resident Space Objects From A Passive Optical Imaging System: : Application to Space Situational Awareness

Abstract: The probability of satellite collisions and disintegrations cluttering the near-Earth orbital environmentis ever-growing. This is especially true for the congested Low Earth Orbit (LEO) regime; once a critical density of objects is reached, a collisional cascading is projected to generate runaway growth of theorbital population. Comprehensive tracking of Resident Space Objects (RSO) is a requisite precursor to conjunction forecasting and avoidance; a strategy for active debris mitigation. Conducted at Arctic Lidar Observatory for Middle Atmosphere Research (ALOMAR) Andøya Space, this work presents a means through which a passive optical observation station can be established using only an off-the shelf Canon EOS-1300 camera for uncued detection. A custom processing pipelinewas developed to perform data reduction on the retrieved images and initialisation of the object orbit was accomplished via implementations of the classic Initial Orbit Determination (IOD) algorithms of Laplace and Gauss. RSO identification was performed by reconstruction of the overpass and comparison against objects in a Two Line Elements (TLE) database. The complete script initiates the tracking process, and requires no inputs other than the image, and the geodetic coordinates of the ground station. The processing pipeline was demonstrated to perform robustly on the collected images and the algorithms were tested for different orbital regimes using precision angular data extracted from literature, with the retrieved results corresponding closely to the available reference values for all orbital regimes. Their performance as predictors of satellite position was compared for a variety of test cases, withthe Gauss algorithm producing more consistent results. However, orbits could not be initialised from the images, due to insufficient angular and timing precision. Various adaptations and extensions are suggested in order to achieve the requisite accuracy in the optical data and improve the data collection.