Correlation and Initial Orbit Determination for Short-Arc Optical Observations

Situational awareness of Earth-orbiting particles is highly important for future human activities in space. For optical observations of debris, multiple observations must be combined in order to determine the orbit of the observed object. It is generally uncertain, however, whether two arbitrary tracks are of the same object, and solving this problem can be computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose a technique of correlating multiple optical observations by means of probability distributions in Poincaré orbit element space.