Research on LSTM-based spatial target trajectory forecasting enhanced by attention mechanisms

To address the strong dependence of space object orbit prediction on physical models and initial conditions, as well as the difficulty of completely eliminating prediction errors, this study proposes a satellite orbit prediction correction method that integrates an attention mechanism with a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. Taking the LAGEOS satellite as the research object, the proposed method uses position error, velocity, and acceleration features extracted from historical orbital data to train a deep learning model for predicting one-day-ahead orbital errors and correcting the SGP4 orbit prediction results. The experimental results show that the ATLSTM model outperforms the LSTM, support vector machine (SVM), back propagation neural network (BP), and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) models in both orbital error prediction and correction. The residual ratios of ATLSTM in the X, Y, and Z axes are reduced to 3.68%, 4.77%, and 2.37%, respectively, effectively improving the accuracy of satellite orbital error prediction. Further analysis indicates that a reasonable setting of the number of neurons helps improve model performance, while the prediction difficulty increases with the extension of the prediction duration, suggesting that the ATLSTM model is more suitable for short-term orbital error prediction and correction. In addition, validation results for satellites at different orbital altitudes demonstrate that the proposed model has certain generalization capability. In summary, combining deep learning methods with physical orbital models can effectively improve the accuracy of space object orbit prediction and provides an effective approach for orbital error prediction, space situational awareness, and collision warning.