Long-Term Orbital Lifetime Prediction of Highly Eccentric Orbits: A Statistical Approach

Abstract

This paper concentrates on the long-term orbital lifetime prediction of highly eccentric orbits (HEOs) based on two-line element sets via a statistical approach. Due to the significantly different evolution characteristics of low- and high-inclination HEOs induced by different orbital resonances, two area-to-mass estimation methods are proposed, respectively. The resonance phenomena encountered in the HEO region strongly affect the orbital evolution and cause high sensitivity. Therefore, a statistical approach is adopted to handle these effects and correctly estimate low-inclination HEO lifetime. We use the Monte Carlo method and kernel-density estimation to calculate the probability distribution of the orbital lifetime. Finally, the performance of the method is assessed by the actual orbital lifetimes of space objects that reentered from HEOs in the past 50 years. The results indicate that our statistical approach can improve the orbital lifetime prediction accuracy to a large extent, especially for the low-inclination HEOs. If a relative error of 15% is adopted as the error tolerance, compared with the traditional method based on a single orbital propagation, our statistical method can increase the success rate from 40% to more than 70%. For the high-inclination HEOs, the objects with a relative error below 15% account for more than 90%.