Seminars

Improvements in sensor capabilities for monitoring orbital debris will yield an increase in the number of detectable objects in Earth orbit.  Current estimates put the number of potentially observable objects at hundreds of thousands.  To maintain custody of these in a space object catalog, tracking systems require robust methods of multi-target state estimation and prediction.  Traditional algorithms employ heuristic approaches such as multiple hypothesis tracking or probabilistic data association to update the state of many targets, but recent advancements allow for a more unified approach to multi-target state estimation.  These methods generalize the single-target Bayes filter to multi-target tracking, which yields a probabilistic framework to including models that, for example, account for new-target birth and detection probabilities less than unity.  Employing these techniques for tracking orbital debris yields a unique set of challenges not present when demonstrating these filters for aviation and maritime problems.  This presentation discusses the application of two of these multi-target filters to the tracking of objects in near-geosynchronous orbit using optical sensors.  Results demonstrate that the filters maintain custody of known targets and instantiate tracks for newly discovered objects even when in the presence of false and missed detections.

  

Dr. Brandon Jones is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.  He currently leads research in space situational awareness (SSA), computationally efficient methods of orbit state and uncertainty propagation, and spacecraft navigation.  Dr. Jones received his bachelor degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Texas at Austin.  He then received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder.  Dr. Jones’ current orbital debris research focuses on the development of information-fusion based methods for tracking space objects.  Dr. Jones is also a part of NASA’s conjunction assessment analysis team for the Magnetospheric Multi-Scale (MMS) mission, and a key component of the ground system includes a tool based on his work in uncertainty propagation using polynomial chaos.  Additionally, Dr. Jones conducts research in mission design under uncertainty and asteroid impact avoidance.