Ground-based optical observation of GEO space debris plays an essential role in tracking, identifying, cataloging, and classifying space debris. The factors that affect the brightness of space debris include size, surface material, illumination geometry, attitude, shape, position, and so on. In order to better understand the influence of the above factors on the brightness of space debris, the synthetic light curves are analyzed. The Ashikhmin–Shirley model is chosen to simulate the light curves of space debris. The effects of orbit, attitude, model parameters, and the location of the observation station on the synthetic light curves are analyzed by the control variable method. Based on the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method (MCMC), the optimal model parameters that characterize the surface material of space debris can be obtained by comparing the synthetic light curves with the observed light curves under certain shape, orbit, and attitude characteristics. The results are roughly in good agreement with those measured in the laboratory.

Through the two-site angle measurement observation with two optical telescopes for space objects, it is possible to determine the position of space objects and address the initial orbit determination problem of short-arc data. It is shown that the positioning accuracy of space objects is closely related to the observation geometry formed by their positions and the two telescopes. It is found that the probability density method shows a large advantage in both calculation speed and accuracy by comparing the accuracy of the different algorithms for the two-site orbit determination. In addition, the simulation results show that the ratio of the positioning error to the orbit altitude decreases with the increase of the parallax angle. Combined with this law, this paper proposes the baseline optimization strategy for space objects with the different orbit altitudes and derives the appropriate observation moment based on the fixed station combination. Further, the observation strategy based on the maximum parallax angle can effectively improve the precision and efficiency of orbit fixing through experimental validation, which has strong practical value.