Maneuver Detection of Space Object for Space Surveillance

Maneuver detection is a very important task for maintaining the catalog of the orbital objects and space situational awareness. This paper mainly focuses on the typical maneuver scenario where space objects only perform tangential orbital maneuvers during a relative long gap. Particularly, only two classical and commonly applied orbital transition manners are considered, i.e. the twice tangential maneuvers at the apogee and the perigee or one tangential maneuver at an arbitrary time. Based on this, we preliminarily estimate the maneuvering mode and parameters by analyzing the change of semi-major axis and eccentricity. Furthermore, if only one tangential maneuver happened, we can formulate the estimation problem of maneuvering parameters as a non-linear least squares problem. To obtain a more sensible and accurate result, the prior knowledge is incorporated into the iterative solving process calculated by SOCP algorithm. Finally, the performance and efficiency of our method are validated by the theoretical analysis and some observations.