A low-cost orbit determination method for mobile communication satellites

We propose a new orbit determination method based on the hybrid scheme of the simulated annealing technique and the steepest descent technique using an onboard magnetometer. The proposed method is proven to be robust, and to have the accuracy for the stationkeeping requirement of LEO (low earth orbit) mobile communication satellites. To verify the proposed method, simulation is performed and the result demonstrates that our method is more robust than other batch methods.