Innovative orbit determination and catalogue building methods for LEO and GEO objects

In the next few years Europe will deploy its Space Situational Awareness system for detecting space objects orbiting the Earth and maintaining a catalogue similar to the USSTRATCOM Two Line Element catalog. This effort calls for the development of new methods, strategies and software to achieve this goal in an innovative and efficient way. The results of two different studies for the catalogue building in GEO and in the upper Low Earth Orbit (between 1000 and 2000 km of altitude) regimes are presented. The GEO study was based with real observational data obtained from the ESA Space Debris Telescope in Tenerife and we proved that it is possible to assemble a set of sparse observations into a set of objects with orbits. The LEO study relies on simulated data and presents a very innovative concept of optical sensors network designed to reduce the need of powerful radars to map the population in the very crowded region between about 1200 to 2000 km of altitude. The studies exploit new preliminary correlation and orbit determination algorithms recently developed by the Celestial Mechanics Group of the University of Pisa.