Patent ID: 9617018
Date: 2017-04-11
CPC Classifications: B64G,G01C

Claim:
1. A method of estimating maneuvers for Earth-orbiting satellites, comprising: acquiring measurement data on an Earth-orbiting satellite from one or more tracking systems; computing measurement residuals as the difference between measured and predicted data in a temporal sliding window for an Earth-orbiting satellite; processing the measurement residuals to identify and validate those residuals that are consistent with the current orbit parameters; processing the measurement residuals to identify and validate those residuals that are consistent with an allowable maneuver of the Earth-orbiting satellites and to reject the remaining measurement residuals; defining an objective function including a residual fit component to the current orbit and maneuver estimate, an orbit consistency component and a penalty component for validated measurement residuals rejected by an orbit determination (OD) engine to bias a selection of a maneuver estimate to fit all or substantially all of the validated measurement residuals; processing the validated measurement residuals to detect an occurrence of a maneuver; upon detection of a maneuver, generating a maneuver estimate; running the OD engine with the maneuver estimate on the validated measurement residuals to update the orbit parameters, said OD engine removing validated measurement residuals that present as outliers given the current orbit and maneuver estimate; evaluating the objective function to determine whether the maneuver estimate satisfies a quality metric; updating the maneuver estimate; repeating the steps of running the OD engine, evaluating the objective function and updating the maneuver estimate until the maneuver estimate satisfies the quality metric; applying the maneuver estimate to update the orbit parameters for the Earth-orbiting satellite; and outputting the orbit parameters and maneuver parameters for the Earth-orbiting satellite.