Unknown Maneuvers

Unknown maneuvers are a common issue when you doing orbit determination (OD) on a satellite that isn't yours. The maneuver(s) is an extra force that if not modeled properly will corrupt your OD fit or cause it to fail altogether. So you need to have a plan to detect when a maneuver might be occurring (the detection problem). and then have a mechanism for trying to reverse engineer it and model it properly. We've been working on this problem for the last couple of years and have developed a Python package CRAM (Characterize, Reconstruct, and Analyze Manuevers) that does just this. It leverages the advanced OD capability of AGI's Orbit Determination Tool Kit (ODTK) .

We published a paper on our approach at the AMOS 2025 conference, You can read it at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396266011_Characterizing_Reconstructing_and_Analyzing_Maneuvers.