Space collision probability computation based on on-board optical cues

Abstract

This paper presents a novel on-board space collision analysis method for space situational awareness. The framework is developed under the following assumptions: 1) A satellite can be equipped with on-board sensors for space object recognition. 2) No a–priori knowledge of the space objects is provided. A space object size and relative state estimation method is firstly proposed, wherein optical cues acquired from onboard sensors are utilized to achieve the estimation. Then, the unscented transform approach is employed to calculate the probability density function (PDF) of collision probability based on the estimate information. Monte Carlo simulations and an experimental test demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve high-precision on-board collision probability estimation with an error less than 3%.