Early Collision and Fragmentation Detection of Space
Objects without Orbit Determination
Author(s)
Axon, Lyndy E.
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Abstract
This paper demonstrates that from using the hypothesized constraint of the admissible
regions it is possible to determine if a combination of new uncorrelated debris objects have
a common origin that also intersects with a known catalog object orbit, thus indicating a
collision or fragmentation has occurred. Admissible region methods are used to bound the
feasible orbit solutions of multiple observations using constraints on energy and radius of
periapsis, propagating them to a common epoch in the past, and using sequential quadratic
programming optimization to find a set of solution states that minimize the Euclidean
distance between the observations at that time. If this given this set of solutions intersects
with a catalog object orbit, then that object is the probabilistic source of the debris objects.
This proposed method is demonstrated on an example of a low-earth object observation.
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Date
2018-05-01
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Text
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Masters Project
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