Rapid Determination of Satellite Ordits from Ooppler Data

In the orbit determination procedure described in this paper, the set of physical quantities fitted in the computations is not the set of basic measurements made by the ground stations. Rather, it uses the basic measurements on a pass-by-pass basis, together with a preliminary estimate of the orbit, to determine a fictitious position of the tracking station for each pass. It can be shown that the error in station position is also a representation of the error in satellite position at the center time of the pass. Thus, for each pass, a new estimate of satellite position is formed, and a new orbit is chosen to fit these positions. It should be possible to apply this method to any type of tracking data. With Doppler data, the convergence of the orbit determination position is much faster than that of the conventional method. *This work supported by the United States Department of the Navy, Bureau of Naval Weapons, under Contract NOw 62-06o4-c.