An orbit determination method of spacecraft based on distribution regression

Abstract A new method of orbit determination (OD) is proposed: distribution regression. The paper focuses on the process of using sparse observation data to determine the orbit of the spacecraft without any prior information. The standard regression process is to learn a map from real numbers to real numbers, but the approach put forward in this paper is to map from probability distributions to real-valued responses. According to the new algorithm, the number of orbital elements can be predicted by embedding the probability distribution into the reproducing kernel Hilbert space. While making full use of the edge of big data, it also avoids the problem that the algorithm cannot converge due to improper initial values in precise OD. The simulation experiment proves the effectiveness, robustness, and rapidity of the algorithm in the presence of noise in the measurement data.