Optimal Sensor Tasking for Space Domain Awareness Via a Beam A*-Search Algorithm

Sensor tasking for space domain awareness is a complex problem that involves scheduling observations of objects in space from one or multiple sensors, usually telescopes. This paper formulates the short-term sensor tasking problem from a single telescope as a purely combinatorial problem and uses a beam version of the A* search algorithm to efficiently search for priority-based observation schedules. Several admissible heuristics are proposed to speed up the search procedure when aiming for sub-GEO, GEO, or both kinds of objects in the same observation window. Several pruning techniques are also implemented to reduce the search space dimension and the computational time required. Simulations are conducted with real space objects retrieved from the Norad catalog and data from one of the telescopes of the Space4 Center at the University of Arizona. The objective is to evaluate the search algorithm’s effectiveness, time complexity, and performance under different real-world scenarios.