Selective Tensorized Multi-layer LSTM for Orbit Prediction

Although the collision of space objects not only incurs a high cost but also threatens human life, the risk of collision between satellites has increased, as the number of satellites has rapidly grown due to the significant interests in many space applications. However, it is not trivial to monitor the behavior of the satellite in real-time since the communication between the ground station and spacecraft is dynamic and sparse, and there is an increased latency due to the long distance. Accordingly, it is strongly required to predict the orbit of a satellite to prevent unexpected contingencies such as a collision. Therefore, the real-time monitoring and accurate orbit prediction are required. Furthermore, it is necessary to compress the prediction model, while achieving a high prediction performance in order to be deployable in the real systems. Although several machine learning and deep learning-based prediction approaches have been studied to address such issues, most of them have applied only basic machine learning models for orbit prediction without considering the size, running time, and complexity of the prediction model. In this research, we propose Selective Tensorized multi-layer LSTM (ST-LSTM) for orbit prediction, which not only improves the orbit prediction performance but also compresses the size of the model that can be applied in practical deployable scenarios. To evaluate our model, we use the real orbit dataset collected from the Korea Multi-Purpose Satellites (KOMPSAT-3 and KOMPSAT-3A) of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) for 5 years. In addition, we compare our ST-LSTM to other machine learning-based regression models, LSTM, and basic tensorized LSTM models with regard to the prediction performance, model compression rate, and running time.