Space Surveillance and Tracking Tool: Implementation and Test of New Methods​

Sammanfattning: In March 2019 the number of artificial objects bigger than 1 mm in orbit around the Earth is estimated to be more than 170 millions. Only a small fraction of them (0.03%) is catalogued. An impact of an operational satellite with one of these debris can damage the satellite and undermine its mission. So it is important to catalogue as many objects as possible in order to reduce the risk of a collisions. This is done by using the software tool Space Object Observations and Kalman Filtering (SPOOK), developed in Airbus Defence and Space in Friedrichshafen. The goal of this Master Thesis was to create newfunctionalities to this tool and improve the existing ones. In particular three main goals have been accomplished: • a new model for the lighting ratio has been built to take into account the occultation of the Sun due to a covering body (for example the Earth or the Moon) and itsinfluence on the solar radiation pressure, necessary to have a good model for orbit propagation; • a tracklet building algorithm has been built to distinguish different tracklets (consecutive observations of the same object along its orbit) as a starting point for the association of different measurements belonging to the same object at distant epochs, necessary to update a catalogue of space objects; • a model to take into account the process noise has been improved giving some suggestion on how to tune the different parameters for different kinds of orbit.