An Improved Laplace Satellite Tracking Method Based on the Kalman Filter

When photoelectric measuring equipment is used to track satellites, the extraction of the short-term or long-term target often fails because the target is weak, clouds block the target, and/or the sun’s angle is too small, resulting in the loss of the tracking target. In this study, an improved Laplacian satellite tracking method based on the Kalman filter is proposed. Firstly, the improved Laplacian algorithm was used for the initial fitting of the equation of motion of a small amount of measurement data. Judgment of the validity and Kalman filtering was carried out on the current frame’s measurement data to calculate the optimal estimate of the current frame’s orbit data, and the accurate equation of motion was iteratively fitted to obtain high-precision data for predicting the satellite’s orbit frame by frame. Numerical tracking of the equipment was carried out. This method was experimentally validated on an actual optical measurement device. The test results showed that this method can make up for the frequent loss of short-term targets. Under the condition that the maximum deviation is less than 3”, the length of extrapolated data can be up to 30 s and the length of the measurement data was less than 30 s. This method may improve the stability of tracking equipment as well as the accuracy and integrity of the measurement data.