New Space Object Cataloguing through Very-Short-Arc Data Mining

Abstract

The space surveillance network collects significant quantities of space object monitoring data on a daily basis, which varies in duration and contain observation errors. Cataloguing space objects based on these data may result in a large number of very short arcs (VSAs) being wasted due to cataloguing flaws, poor data quality, data precessing, and so on. To address this problem, an effective data mining method based on tracklet-to-object matching is proposed to improve the data utilization in new object cataloguing. The method can enhance orbital constraints based on useful track information in mined tracklets, improve the accuracy of catalogued orbits, and achieve the transformation of omitted observations into “treasures”. The performance of VSAs is evaluated in tracklet-to-object matching, which is less sensitive to tracklet duration and separation time than initial orbit determination (IOD) and track association. Further, the data mining method is applied to new space object cataloguing based on radar tracklets and achieved significant improvements. The 5-day data utilization increased by 9.5%, and the orbit determination and prediction accuracy increased by 11.1% and 23.6%, respectively, validating the effectiveness of our method in improving the accuracy of space object orbit cataloguing. The method shows promising potential for the space object cataloguing and relevant applications.