Information-Driven Search and Track of Novel Space Objects

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel joint sensor control and multi-target tracking method for space object search and tracking, utilizing CPHD to handle uncertainties and false positives, improving efficiency in space surveillance.

Contribution

It introduces a combined sensor control and multi-target tracking framework using CPHD for space object search, addressing uncertainties and false positives in follow-up observations.

Findings

Enhanced tracking of novel space objects with CPHD.

Improved sensor tasking efficiency over naive strategies.

Effective handling of false positives and missed detections.

Abstract

Space surveillance depends on efficiently directing sensor resources to maintain custody of known catalog objects. However, it remains unclear how to best utilize these resources to rapidly search for and track newly detected space objects. Provided a novel measurement, a search set can be instantiated through admissible region constraints to inform follow-up observations. In lacking well-constrained bounds, this set rapidly spreads in the along-track direction, growing much larger than a follow-up sensor's finite field of view. Moreover, the number of novel objects may be uncertain, and follow-up observations are most commonly corrupted by false positives from known catalog objects and missed detections. In this work, we address these challenges through the introduction of a joint sensor control and multi-target tracking approach. The search set associated to a novel measurement is represented by a Cardinalized Probability Hypothesis Density (CPHD), which jointly tracks the state uncertainty associated to a set of objects and a probability mass function for the true target number. In follow-up sensor scans, the information contained in an empty measurement set, and returns from both novel objects and known catalog objects is succinctly captured through this paradigm. To maximize the utility of a follow-up sensor, we introduce an information-driven sensor control approach for steering the instrument. Our methods are tested on two relevant test cases and we provide a comparative analysis with current naive tasking strategies.