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I have been recently acquainted with orbital mechanics and am trying to do some analysis on the subject. Since I don't have subject matter expertise, I was at a crossroads with trying to decide that how would one determine if a satellite has performed maneuver/rendezvous operation given the historical TLE data of that satellite from which we extract the orbital elements. To drill down further, I am approaching to the problem like this:

  1. I take my satellite of interest and collect the historical TLE data for it.
  2. Once, I have the data, I extract and calculate all the orbital parameters from the TLE.
  3. From the list of orbital parameters, I choose a subset of those parameters and calculate long term standardized anomalies for each of them.
  4. Once I have the anomalies, I filter out those dates where any one parameter has anomalies greater than 1.5 or less than -1.5.

But the deal is, I am not too sure of my subset. As of now, I have Inclination, RAAN, Argument of Perigee and Longitude.

Is there any other factor that I should add or remove from this subset in order to nail this analysis the right way? Or is there altogether any other approach that I can use?

What I'm interested in, is to find out the days when a satellite has performed maneuvers.

aashay shah
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1 Answers1

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You should add major and minor semi axis sizes (min and max altitude). Those changes after any burns along trajectory or perpendicular to it and decrease from friction for too low orbits.

Analyzing that can possibly hint what kind of maneuver was performed. Also changing those is usually done on the opposite side of the orbit so once you find a bump in periaxis or apoaxis the burn most likely ocured half orbit before reaching it.

Another stuff I would detect was speed. Compute local speed as derivation of consequent data points distance/time) and compare that with Kepler's equation. If they are not matching it means some kind of burn or collision or ejection ocured. and from the difference you can also detect what has been done.

For more info see:

Spektre
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