Modelling of LEO Satellites Trajectories and Their Tracking With Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) & Unscented Kalman Filter(UKF)

The radar tracking is one of the best LEO satellite tracking methods. While Since the tracking filters which are mostly linear, and are not able to have a precise estimation of the objects with nonlinear motion dynamics such as satellite, we should use nonlinear filters. In this paper, firstly, we deal with the problem of the LEO satellites motion path modelling according to the satellite motion emulation with the Cowell equations. Then the observations will be separately fed to non-linear Extended Kalman Filter as well as Unscented Kalman Filter and with studying the RMS position estimation error, their performance for satellite tracking will be evaluated. Simulation results demonstrate that the UKF filter has a better performance in terms of accuracy in comparison with the EKF.