Mass Estimation Through Fusion of Astrometric and Photometric Data Collection with Application to High Area-to-Mass Ratio Objects Matthew J Richardson This thesis work presents the formulation for a tool developed in MATLAB to determine the mass of a space object from the fusion of astrometric and photometric data. The application for such a tool is to better model the mass estimation method us...

an algebraic construction for constant dimension subspace codes is called orbit code. it arises as the orbits under the action of a subgroup of the general linear group on subspaces in an ambient space. in particular orbit codes of a singer subgroup of the general linear group has investigated recently. in this paper, we consider the normalizer of a singer subgroup of the general linear group a...

In the last ten years significant advances have been made in gravity field modelling, culminating in general-purpose models like JGM-3, TEG-3 and EGM96. Significant defects remain in the quality of the models when applied to orbit determination of some altimeter satellites, leading to large orbit errors, characterised by the geographically-correlated nature of the altimeter crossover height dif...

In this paper, several attitude estimation designs are developed for the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) spacecraft. A contingency attitude determination mode is required in the event of a primary sensor failure. The final design utilizes a full sixth-order Kalman filter. However, due to initial software concerns, the need to investigate simpler designs was required. The algorithms...

This paper describes the essential segments of a satellite based communication and asset management system. The Low Earth Orbit satellite used for such a system is the ORBCOMM low earth orbit (LEO) constellation. The architecture and network structure of the satellite system is described. The satellites themselves are very small and are launched using the Pegasus launch vehicle. This makes the ...

The on-orbit radiometric response calibration of the VISible/Near InfraRed (VISNIR) and the Short-Wave InfraRed (SWIR) bands of the Visible/Infrared Imager/Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite is carried out through a Solar Diffuser (SD). The transmittance of the SD screen and the SD’s Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF...

A completely geometric approach for precise orbit determination (POD) of low earth orbiter (LEO) spacecraft has been devised by the authors which does not use dynamic models, but only data from the GPS receiver onboard the LEO and the International GPS Service (IGS) precise GPS ephemeris product. The strategy relies on combining the time-continuous measurement strength of the pseudorange and ca...

This paper utilizes Aubry-Mather theory to construct instability regions for a certain three body problem. We consider a Sun-Jupiter-Comet system and under some simplifying assumptions and show the existence of instabilities for orbit of the comet. In particular we show that a comet which starts close to orbit of an ellipse of eccentricity e = 0.748 can increase in eccentricity up to e = 0.826....