(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-08-01)
Renegar, Luke W.; Gunter, Brian C.
Because of their relative simplicity, optical tracking systems are potentially much more
cost-effective than radar for tracking resident space objects (RSOs); however, they suffer from
a key drawback compared to radar in that they cannot provide range information. One way of
overcoming this limitation is by triangulating the RSO’s position using multiple geographically
diverse sensors. This paper presents a comparison of using triangulation techniques against
using observations from similar ground station arrangements in more traditional sensor fusion
techniques, such as Kalman Filtering. The influence of the geographical layout of the sensors
on the quality of the orbit solution is discussed, as is the impact of the number of ground
stations in the network. Performance comparisons are placed in the context of usefulness to
RSO catalog maintenance, and the question of whether the improvements are operationally
meaningful is explored.