Experimental Validation of Initial Orbit Determination of Resident Space Objects Using Probabilistic Admissible Regions
Bart KIEBOOM, Martin MICHEL, Urs HUGENTOBLER
Abstract. This work considers the catalogue generation problem using ground-based passive optical data. In this context, surveillance observations often yield tracklets with very short arcs. These tracklets consist of a set of angular measurements closely spaced in time, covering only a small part of the object’s orbit. This data is insufficient for conventional (Initial) Orbit Determination (IOD) and no full orbit can be derived. A different approach using the Admissible Region (AR), defined as the set of possible range and range-rate pairs consistent with the tracklet, is an effort to tackle this problem. Here we apply the Probabilistic Admissible Region, which is a probabilistic representation of the AR, to real-world optical data and use it to perform tracklet correlation and IOD to provide an experimental validation of the methodology.
Keywords
IOD, SST, SSA, Probabilistic Admissible Region, Tracklet Correlation, Space Surveillance, Space Debris, Astrodynamics, Gaussian Mixture Models
Published online 7/20/2026, 6 pages
Copyright © 2026 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA
Citation: Bart KIEBOOM, Martin MICHEL, Urs HUGENTOBLER, Experimental Validation of Initial Orbit Determination of Resident Space Objects Using Probabilistic Admissible Regions, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 69, pp 1059-1064, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644904251-183
The article was published as article 183 of the book CEAS – AIDAA Conference 2025
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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