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Abstract: Currently, India has 124 functional artificial satellites orbiting around the earth. Due to increased human activity in the last two decades, near-earth space is becoming congested from functional/non-functional satellites and space debris which along with natural asteroids and space weather, pose natural, accidental or intentional threats to the functional and expensive satellites. It is imperative to track Indian space assets continuously as well as assess natural, intentional or unintentional threats a priori to take necessary actions, which is termed Space Situational Awareness (SSA). Recently, ISRO launched the Network for Space Objects, Tracking, and Analysis (NETRA) project to cater to national SSA requirements, which is currently in the developmental stage.
This lecture will focus on the tracking of artificial space objects using ground-based observations. A brief overview of modelling the dynamics of earth-orbiting space objects, designing suitable estimation algorithms and challenges in the numerical implementation of tracking algorithms will be discussed. We will briefly touch upon the challenge of tracking debris less than 10 cm in size. Finally, some standard tracking and collision alert data formats and sharing mechanisms will be discussed. |