Research is being performed on the development of methods for improving the orbit prediction and determination accuracy of geosynchronous satellites, particularly when there is sparse data. T he US currently maintains orbital elements on 10,000 space objects with sizes as small as 10 cm. To protect the International Space Station and other valuable assets it is desirable to track objects as small as 2 cm in diameter. To accommodate such a significant increase in the number of objects many procedures will have to be changed and new algorithms developed. More efficient tasking of our sensors will be necessary.
Research is underway to develop new algorithms for sensor tasking and the correlation of UCTs.