Photon Keepers

Recently, the number of active and inactive resident space objects (RSOs) has dramatically increased due to advances in satellite technology, the increasing accessibility in cost and availability of space launches, and collisional cascades of inactive RSOs. Due to the high cost of radar systems and telescopes, constant all-sky coverage is currently infeasible, leading to uncorrelated tracks (UCTs) as RSOs perform maneuvers in transit between two monitoring systems. Traditional methods of orbital determination and propagation using least squares methods are highly problematic due to the rigidity of the algorithm in a problem which is riddled with uncertainties from the limited resolution, low signal-to-noise ratios, and sparse observations. Arete proposes Photon Keepers, a software package which uses probabilistic methods, namely the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, to perform chain of custody handoff operations as well as UCT resolution. The strength of the MCMC algorithm is that measurement errors and priors on probable maneuvers can be introduced. Additionally, unconventional gravity fields, multi-body interactions, and priors on maneuvers can be introduced to the algorithm in a modular fashion. Additionally, MCMCs are highly parallelizable, leading to rapid determinations of future or past positions of RSOs. When paired with AreteÆs Photon Sleuth pipeline, which autonomously preprocesses O/IR data, and detects RSOs, Photon Keeper will be a powerful system for automatically detecting, characterizing, and propagating orbits for chain of custody or UCT resolution purposes