Research Seminar: High order methods for space surveillance and tracking problems

Space surveillance and tracking systems have to face the challenging problem of accurately managing uncertainties in highly nonlinear dynamical environments. Uncertainties affect all the main phases necessary for the successful realisation of an SST system; e.g. observation planning, orbit determination, collision probability computation, and re-entry predictions. Since the amount of data that must be processed is huge, efficient methods for the management of uncertainties are required. Differential algebraic techniques can represent a valuable tool to address these tasks. Differential algebra (DA) supplies the tools to compute the derivatives of functions within a computer environment and thus it enables the efficient computation of high-order expansions of the flow of ordinary differential equations (with respect to initial conditions and/or model parameters) and the approximation of the solution manifold of implicit equations in Taylor series. This presentation gives an overview on the application of DA techniques to the problems of uncertainty propagation, initial orbit determination, state estimation, and collision probability computation.