Effective orbit determination following multiple spacecraft separation

Initial conditions uncertainties due to the separation from the launcher affects the orbit estimation problem, especially when the information is needed almost immediately after the release. Problems increase when several spacecraft, as in the frequent case of multiple launches, have to be tracked at the same time. Specifically, the case where a ground station i.e. very far from the targets, tracks a sequence of releases at short intervals creates the chance of some misunderstanding in measurements attribution among the different spacecraft. The paper examines the possible application of estimation theory advances, as a variable attribution modified Kalman filtering or the dense filtering to the problem of multiple spacecraft separation in LEO.