Doppler-based Orbit Determination Using Network of Low-Cost Ground Stations

The problem of near-Earth environment congestion has become increasingly important due to the growing number of both active and inactive Resident Space Objects. The U.S. Strategic Command's Joint Space Operations Center processes more that 400.000 measurements daily taken by the Space Surveillance Network that includes a wide range of RF and electro-optical sensors. The catalog information can be augmented by the observations taken not only by high-end designated tracking assets, but also by cost-effective consumer-level sensors. While lacking high sensitivity, these sensors can still be used to perform uncued Initial Orbit Determination. Recently, in addition to electro-optical sensors, the appearance of low-cost Software-Defined Radios made it possible to deploy low-cost passive radar tracking stations. By using a network of such stations it might render possible to create and maintain an open-source orbiting object catalog. The proposed research is focused on developing software infrastructure to process measurements from multiple ground stations and perform orbit determination from Doppler observations.