Automated Operations for the Maintenance of a Space Object Database

Reihs, Benedikt; Vananti, Alessandro; Schildknecht, Thomas; Siminski, Jan; Flohrer, Tim (2020). Automated Operations for the Maintenance of a Space Object Database. In: 71st International Astronautical Congress (IAC). Proceedings. 12.10-14.10.2020.

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To cope with the increasing number of objects in space around Earth, the processing of observations of these objects shall be automated as much as possible. In this work, the automation of three parts of the maintenance of a space object orbit database, commonly called catalogue, is analysed. The first one is the association of new measurements with stored orbits in the database based on a comparison in a common coordinate frame using the Mahalanobis distance under the assumption of normally distributed errors. It is shown for radar observations, that making this comparison in either the observation or orbit coordinates is only feasible if the error in the transformed system is small enough to remain normal after the transformation. Additional work is dedicated to derive a quality measure from the orbit state and covariance to give feedback, which also considers new measurements, on the current status or quality of an object in the database. Different concepts from information theory, namely the entropy and the surprisal, are tested and found to be useful quantities for these tasks. Future work will need to extend these parameters to consider further information and test their robustness with large data sets.

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