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Luca Gentile and Marco Martorella, "LEO RSO Initial Orbit Determination using Range-only Multi-Bistatic Radar measurements", 2018 SpaceOps Conference. Marseille, France, doi:10.2514/6.2018-2717

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The increasing space activity for Earth observation in the last fifty years has led to the launch of many satellites and other space objects which orbit around the Earth. The majority of these objects are debris, including inactive spacecrafts, parts of launch vehicles and fragments of systems created by explosions or collisions. These objects are commonly defined as Resident Space Objects (RSO) and their size varies from few centimetres, such as screws and other small fragments, up to meters. They constitute a serious hazard for current and future space missions since their orbiting velocities are of the order of a few km/s and an impact can cause a major damage to spacecrafts and a serious threat for their crew, even in case of small objects. For this reason, RSO observation has become a major challenge for the research community worldwide. The aim of the proposed research is to describe a new approach of RSOs initial orbit determination based on range-only multibistatic radar measurements and to evaluate its performances by means of simulations.