The OUWG aim is to advance the community’s understanding of orbital uncertainties, building on previous work, including the 2016 paper by Poore et al, ‘Covariance and Uncertainty Realism in Space Surveillance and Tracking’.
This will be achieved by conducting a series of 6 workshops, organised by GNOSIS, where participants will be invited to describe relevant research that they have previously conducted, and discuss topics that require further investigation.
This working group activity is sponsored by the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), and will conclude with a white paper. This paper will both collate and organise the material from the workshops and set out a programme of research activities that could be pursued over the coming 5-10 years.
Our long-term goal is to exploit progress within the OUWG community to enhance SDA capabilities for multi-object orbit determination, custody, and cataloguing in a similar timeframe.
Uncertainty topics that will be covered in the planned series of workshops include:
- Sensor level errors including measurement noise and sensor and navigation biases
- Hardware and software faults/errors
- Sensor timing errors
- Uncertain parameters found in the model dynamics (including the space environment) and in the measurement equations relating the dynamics to the sensor measurements
- Structural uncertainty or model bias in the model dynamics
- Additional sources of uncertainty occur for medium to large objects called extended body uncertainties. For example, an extended body covering several pixels may have an overly optimistic (too small) covariance if the uncertainty of the estimated state only covers the centroid of the body
- Propagation of uncertainty
- Algorithmic uncertainty or numerical uncertainty that comes from numerical errors and numerical approximations in a computer model
- Cross-tag or mis-association uncertainty
- Inverse uncertainty quantification including the statistical orbit determination and bias estimation uncertainty
Workshop Schedule
Workshop |
Date |
Venue |
Topics |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 29th January | Warwick | Sensor level errors including measurement noise and sensor and navigation biases; Hardware and software faults/errors; Sensor timing errors. |
| 2 | 25th March | Birmingham | Uncertain parameters found in the model dynamics (including space environment) and in the measurement equation relating the dynamics to the sensor measurements; |
| 3 | 20th May | Strathclyde | Structural uncertainty or model bias in the model dynamics; Additional sources of uncertainty occur for medium to large objects called extended body uncertainties. For example, an extended body covering several pixels may have an overly optimistic (too small) covariance if the uncertainty of the estimated state only covers the centroid of the body; |
| 4 | 15th July | The British Interplanetary Society, London | Propagation of uncertainty; Algorithmic uncertainty or numerical uncertainty that comes from numerical errors and numerical approximations in a computer model; Cross-tag or mis-association uncertainty; |
| 5 | 9th September | UCL, London | Inverse uncertainty quantification including the statistical orbit determination and bias estimation uncertainty; |
| 6 | 27th November | Space Geodesy Facility, Herstmonceux | ‘Wash-up’ meeting and planning for white paper |
Are you a UK-based* subject expert who would like to participate in the OUWG?
*The OUWG aims to conduct most workshops in person with limited virtual participation, given this aim we are looking primarily for UK members, although it is not exclusive to them.
(N.B. this site is password-protected. If you are a member of the OUWG and need help with accessing the site then please contact the GNOSIS team).