Shooting Scheme for Perturbations in Optimised Solution of the Orbital Boundary Value Problem

Monitoring of the near-Earth space environment has become more and more important in recent times. The constantly increasing amount of space debris is a major threat for space activities and an exhaustive knowledge about the space objects population is of primary importance for civil and military applications. The surveillance of the space surrounding the Earth is achieved by means of sensors based on different technologies. Passive optical observations using ground telescopes are usually employed to track space objects in high altitude orbits. The obtained measurements are sparse, and their arcs are very short. The computation of the orbit based on these observations is challenging and several methods have been proposed. One of the known approaches relies on an optimization scheme of the classical boundary value problem. However, in the latter, the object motion is described by a Keplerian orbit without considering additional perturbations. In this novel approach, orbital perturbations are introduced in the computation procedure using a shooting model. The improved algorithm is applied to simulated observations of objects in the geostationary region under the influence of solar radiation pressure. The measured arcs are separated by intervals of one or more orbit revolutions. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of accuracy considering different levels of perturbation.