Passive tracking from the combined set of bearings and frequency measurements by single satellite

In this paper, a new passive modified iterated extended Kalman filter (MIEKF) using the combined set of bearings and frequency measurements in Earth Centered Inertial (ECI) coordinate is proposed. A new measurement update equation of MIEKF is derived by modifying the objective function of the Gauss-Newton iteration. A new gain equation and iteration termination criteria are acquired by applying the property of the maximum likelihood estimate. The approximated second order linearized state propagation equation, Jacobian matrix of state transfer and measurement equations are derived in satellite two-body movement. The tracking performances of MIEKF, iterated extended Kalman filter (IEKF) and extended Kalman filter (EKF) are compared via Monte Carlo simulations through simulated data from STK8. 1. Simulation results indicate that the proposed MIEKF is possible to passively track low earth circular orbit satellite by a high earth orbit satellite, and has higher tracking precision than the IEKF and EKF. © 2012 South China University of Technology, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.