Space Surveillance and Tracking Tool Implementation and Test of New Methods

In December 2018 the number of artificial objects bigger than 1mm in orbit around the Earth is more than 200 millions [2]. Only a small fraction of them (0.03 %) is catalogued. An impact of an operational satellite with one of this debris can damage the satellite and undermine its mission. So it is important to catalogue as many objects as possible in order to reduce the risk of a collisions. This is done by using the software tool Space Object Observations and Kalman Filtering (SPOOK), developed in Airbus Defence and Space in Friedrichshafen. The goal of this Master Thesis is to create new functionalities to this tool and improve the existing ones. In particular three main goals have been accomplished: • a new model for the lighting ratio was built to take into account the occultation of the Sun due to a covering body (for example the Earth or the Moon) and its influence on the solar radiation pressure, necessary to have a good model for orbit propagation; • a tracklet builder algorithm was built to distinguish different tracklets (consecutive observations of the same object along its orbit) as a starting point for the association of different measurements belonging the same object at distant epochs, necessary to update a catalogue of space objects; • the model to take into account the process noise was improved giving some suggestion on how to tune the different parameters for different kinds of orbit.