Orbit uncertainty propagation plays an important role in the analysis of a space mission. The accuracy and computation expense are two critical essences of uncertainty propagation. Repeated evaluations of the objective model are required to improve the preciseness of prediction, especially for long-term propagation. To balance the computational complexity and accuracy, an adaptive Gaussian mixture model using virtual sample generation (AGMM-VSG) is proposed. First, an unscented transformation and Cubature rule (UT-CR) based splitting method is employed to adaptive update the weights of Gaussian components for nonlinear dynamics. The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) approximation is applied to better approximate the original probability density function. Second, instead of the pure expensive evaluations by conventional GMM methods, virtual samples are generated using a new active-sampling-based Kriging (AS-KRG) method to improve the propagation efficiency. Three cases of uncertain orbital dynamical systems are used to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed manuscript. The likelihood agreement measure (LAM) criterion and the number of expense evaluations prove the performance.

In the realm of precision space applications, improving the accuracy of orbit determination (OD) is a crucial and demanding task, primarily because of the presence of measurement noise. To address this issue, a novel machine learning method based on bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) is proposed in this research. In particular, the proposed method aims to improve the OD accuracy of Earth–Moon Libration orbits with angle-only measurements. The proposed BiLSTM network is designed to detect inaccurate measurements during an OD process, which is achieved by incorporating the least square method (LSM) as a basic estimation approach. The structure, inputs, and outputs of the modified BiLSTM network are meticulously crafted for the detection of inaccurate measurements. Following the detection of inaccurate measurements, a compensating strategy is devised to modify these detection results and thereby reduce their negative impact on OD accuracy. The modified measurements are then used to obtain a more accurate OD solution. The proposed method is applied to solve the OD problem of a 4:1 synodic resonant near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Earth–Moon L2 point. The training results reveal that the bidirectional network structure outperforms the regular unidirectional structures in terms of detection accuracy. Numerical simulations show that the proposed method can reduce the estimated error by approximately 10%. The proposed method holds significant potential for future missions in cislunar space.

We tackle the problem of establishing dense correspondences between a pair of images in an efficient way. Most existing dense matching methods use 4D convolutions to filter incorrect matches, but 4D convolutions are highly inefficient due to their quadratic complexity. Besides, these methods learn features with fixed convolutions which cannot make learnt features robust to different challenge scenarios. To deal with these issues, we propose an Efficient Dynamic Correspondence Network (EDCNet) by jointly equipping preseparate convolution (Psconv) and dynamic convolution (Dyconv) to establish dense correspondences in a coarse-to-fine manner. The proposed EDCNet enjoys several merits. First, two welldesigned modules including a neighbourhood aggregation (NA) module and a dynamic feature learning (DFL) module are combined elegantly in the coarse-to-fine architecture, which is efficient and effective to establish both reliable and accurate correspondences. Second, the proposed NA module maintains linear complexity, showing its high efficiency. And our proposed DFL module has better flexibility to learn features robust to different challenges. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on three challenging datasets including HPatches, Aachen Day-Night and InLoc.

Current orbit uncertainty propagation (OUP) and orbit determination (OD) methods suffer from drawbacks related to high computational burden, limiting their applications in deep space missions. To this end, this paper proposes a multivariate attention-based method for efficient OUP and OD of Earth–Jupiter transfer. First, a neural network-based OD framework is utilized, in which the orbit propagation process in a traditional unscented transform (UT) and unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is replaced by the neural network. Then, the sample structure of training the neural network for the Earth–Jupiter transfer is discussed and designed. In addition, a method for efficiently generating a large number of samples for the Earth–Jupiter transfer is presented. Next, a multivariate attention-based neural network (MANN) is designed for orbit propagation, which shows better capacity in terms of accuracy and generalization than the deep neural network. Finally, the proposed method is successfully applied to solve the OD problem in an Earth–Jupiter transfer. Simulations show that the proposed method can obtain a similar estimation to the UKF while saving more than 90% of the computational cost.

As deep space exploration activities increase worldwide, the explorati...