Monitoring of Geostationary Earth Orbit Satellites in Russian Space Surveillance Center

Abstract

Cataloging of geostationary-Earth-orbit (GEO)satellites commenced in the Russian Space Surveillance Center (SSC) in the 1980s. Enhancement of the software tools for catalog maintenance has continued since that time. The current status of this software complex is described. The characteristics of the sensors and the observed satellites that determine the structure of the catalog maintenance algorithms are discussed. There are certain essential limitations of the range of the observed longitudes of GEO satellites, the frequency of the observations, and their accuracy. Under these conditions, the loss of measurement data is unacceptable; the algorithms must use any observational data for catalog maintenance. The correlation of measurements with the cataloged orbits and subsequent orbit updating must be possible for the very wide range of the accuracy of the measurements. A fast and accurate prediction algorithm was developed to solve this task successfully. Thus, it became possible to develop and implement in the SSC an efe cient complex of software tools for catalog maintenance. The general scheme is described of this complex and of its most signie cant components: primary determination of orbits, correlation of the observations with the cataloged satellites, updating of orbits using the measurements, planning of the observations and targeting of the sensors, and preliminary tracking of new satellites. Some results of the testing, based on real data, are presented.