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Orbit Determination with the two-body Integrals

Gronchi, Giovanni Federico and Dimare, Linda and Milani, Andrea (2010) Orbit Determination with the two-body Integrals. Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy, 107 (3). pp. 299-318.

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    Abstract

    We investigate a method to compute a finite set of preliminary orbits for solar system bodies using the first integrals of the Kepler problem. This method is thought for the applications to the modern sets of astrometric observations, where often the information contained in the observations allows only to compute, by interpolation, two angular positions of the observed body and their time derivatives at a given epoch; we call this set of data attributable. Given two attributables of the same body at two different epochs we can use the energy and angular momentum integrals of the two-body problem to write a system of polynomial equations for the topocentric distance and the radial velocity at the two epochs. We define two different algorithms for the computation of the solutions, based on different ways to perform elimination of variables and obtain a univariate polynomial. Moreover we use the redundancy of the data to test the hypothesis that two attributables belong to the same body (linkage problem). It is also possible to compute a covariance matrix, describing the uncertainty of the preliminary orbits which results from the observation error statistics. The performance of this method has been investigated by using a large set of simulated observations of the Pan-STARRS project.

    Item Type: Article
    Uncontrolled Keywords: Orbit determination, Algebraic methods, Attributables, Linkage, Covariance matrix
    Subjects: Area01 - Scienze matematiche e informatiche > MAT/07 - Fisica matematica
    Divisions: Dipartimenti (until 2012) > DIPARTIMENTO DI MATEMATICA "L. TONELLI"
    Depositing User: Dott. Giovanni Federico Gronchi
    Date Deposited: 03 Nov 2010
    Last Modified: 20 Dec 2010 11:44
    URI: http://eprints.adm.unipi.it/id/eprint/751

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