Poster abstract details

Dromo is a robust, efficient and regular formulation of orbital dynamics based on seven generalized orbital elements. It is almost-fully regularized, i.e. the $1/r^3$ singularity is eliminated from the equations of motion thanks to a Sundman transformation of order two, and it has recently been perfected by reformulating its elements as to include a perturbing potential and a time element. Moreover, variants of the formulation optimized for highly elliptic and hyperbolic orbits have been developed. When used for numerical orbit propagation, it has showed excellent performance when compared with advanced propagation schemes such as the Kustaanheimo-Stiefele and Sperling-Burdet.
The poster provides an overview of Dromo and some of its applications to Space Situational Awareness. As an applicative example, we present some results of applying Dromo formulations to reduce trajectory propagation error during planetary close approaches by asteroids. This is of high scientific and technological interest, as the propagation error has been known to be a source of chaotic dynamics in the prediction of asteroid close passes.
In the future, we will explore the feasibility of exploiting Dromo’s remarkable efficiency and accuracy in orbit determination and long-term estimation and minimization of collision probability of asteroids and space debris. In both cases data samples appear to be scarce due to shortage of (or security restrictions on) available observations. In this context, the possibility of using Bayesian inference to increase data fidelity is highly appealing.