Homotopy Particle Filter for Ground-Based Tracking of Satellites at GEO

Ground telescopes enable low-cost tracking and characterization of meter-class space objects. Since a telescope may be tasked to observe multiple fields of the sky, the time between observations for each object may vary from several seconds to tens of minutes. Long propagation times with nonlinear dynamics are challenging for traditional filtering methods such as the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Sampling-based filters based on the Particle Filter (PF) are promising for this type of problem but typically require maintaining a large number of samples. In this work, we evaluate the Homotopy Particle Filter (HPF) which promises effective performance with orders of magnitude fewer particles. The performance of the HPF is evaluated against GEO satellite observations collected by a ground telescope at Lockheed Martin’s Space Object Tracking (SPOT) facility.