Space Situational Awareness / Uncooperative Orbits

This research area focuses on the challenges and limitations of current orbital solutions in the context of Space Situational Awareness (SSA), with a particular emphasis on uncooperative orbits. Our work aims to improve orbit solutions for space traffic management operations, analyzing both uncooperative and cooperative tracking methods. We investigate the accuracy of state-of-the-art techniques and develop new approaches to enhance the reliability of orbital data for SSA.

Key results and analysis are presented in the paper “On the Limits of Current Practices in Uncooperative Space Surveillance: Analysis of Mega-Constellation Data Time-Series” (AMOS 2023).

Time evolution of positional discrepancy between NORAD TLEs, Supplemental TLEs (Celestrak), and Operator Ephemeris Data (GNSS). The horizontal dotted lines represent a new TLE updating the state vector that is being propagated using SGP4.