A new satellite to satellite tracking algorithm from Doppler-shifted frequency measurements

A new satellite to satellite tracking (SST) algorithm from Doppler-shifted frequency measurements is proposed. The estimation principle is demonstrated and the mathematic model of SST is established. The state estimation methods for a user (the cooperative case) and target satellites (the non-cooperative case) are presented based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). The Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLB) are deduced as well. Performance of the new algorithm is validated through computer simulations, which proved that the proposed method is effective in terms of the estimation quality compared with CRLB and superior in accuracy to the Bearings-Only (BO) method in almost all simulation cases except for the case that an enough long tracking arc-length is obtained for a user satellite.