Patent Document ID: 8386099
Application ID: 12656642
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of determining an orbit of an orbital object, comprising: (a) specifying a set of tracking measurement values for the orbit using at least one processor; (b) specifying a force model to represent forces acting on the orbital object; (c) selecting a numerical or analytical integration scheme to compute the object's orbit; (d) specifying known initial conditions including position and velocity for the object; (e) distributing a series of maneuvers over the potential range for which maneuver solutions may occur; (f) applying an orbit propagation scheme to compute the orbit from the initial conditions to the time of the last tracking measurement; (g) computing predicted tracking measurement values based on the orbit computed from the initial conditions; (h) computing the differences between the actual and predicted tracking measurements; (i) determining an improved estimate of the initial conditions that reduces the sum of squares of measurement errors using a minimization or root finding algorithm; (j) repeating operations (f) through (i) until the algorithm converges so that the change in the estimated initial conditions is below a predetermined value; (k) after the algorithm has converged, reviewing the hypothetical maneuvers in the force model, taking each value and determining which values came up as near-zero in the minimized solutions and which values came up as those of measurable thrust; (l) determining overall burn duration using the first and last burn times; (m) determining the thrust profile of the orbital object over the observation period using the integrated thrust values; and (n) determining the actual maneuver based on the observation data.