Impulsive manoeuvre reconstruction from public orbit data

As the importance of space situational awareness grows along the rapid increase of artificial objects in the orbital regimes, understanding behaviours of those objects can provide useful information that is not always public. To this end, a novel formulation to identify and characterise an impulsive manoeuvre from historical data is presented, based on the least-square optimisation which is widely used for orbit determination. The Gauss’ Planetary Equations are aggregated together with the Keplerian element formulation, which leads to a linear relationship between an impulsive manoeuvre and orbit elements difference. An epoch of the manoeuvre can be identified by searching the true anomaly which minimises the difference between the observations and the least-square solution. The proposed approach is validated against real orbit data from the Sentinel-3A spacecraft.