Normal-place formation is a century-old technique that is still widely practiced in orbit determination. A "normal place" is a measurement combined from several closely associated observations of an orbiting body. Although normal-place reduction of artificial satellite tracking was advocated by Herrick as early as 1959, normal places as such are not explicitly used by the centers processing US Space Surveillance Network observations. In this paper, the authors suggest pre-processed normal places as an alternative measurement for general orbit determination and sensor performance characterization, and describe the relevant results and techniques used in their experimental normal-place transformations of higher-rate satellite tracking data.
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