Design of Novel Augmented Extended and Unscented Kalman Filters for Uncontrolled Satellites

In this paper, we propose novel augmented extended and unscented Kalman filters (AEUKF) to estimate the position, velocity, and other key parameters associated with reentry of uncontrolled old satellites into the earth’s atmosphere. In order to compare their estimation performances explicitly, both observers are designed for the same satellite model and run with the same covariance matrices under the same initial conditions. In the simulation results, it is shown that augmented unscented Kalman filter (AUKF) outperforms the augmented extended Kalman filter (AEKF). Moreover, both filters provide proper estimations for the uncertain systematic parameters of the satellite. I