A Maneuvered GEO Satellite Orbit Determination Using Robustly Adaptive Kalman Filter

After a brief discussion on the dynamic and geometric orbit determinations, the observation model, dynamic model and Kalman filter for a geostationary (GEO) satellite orbit determination are introduced. A robustly adaptive Kalman filter based on variance component estimation is proposed for orbit determination of a maneuvered GEO satellite. The main idea is to use robust estimation to resist the influence of measurement outliers and use an adaptive factor to control the effect of dynamic model errors. Simulations with the Chinese ground tracking network for a maneuvered GEO satellite were conducted to verify the performance of the proposed orbit determination technique. The results show that it can efficiently control both the influence of outliers and that of thrust force, and can provide high and reliable orbit accuracy.