BiLSTM-driven error compensation for high-precision orbit prediction with two-line elements
Beijing Institute of Technology Press Co., LtdWith the exponential increase in the number of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO), collision risks have risen correspondingly, making high-precision orbit prediction a core requirement for ensuring satellite safety and space environment management. Two-Line Elements (TLEs) are the only publicly available orbital data source and are widely used in conjunction with the Simplified General Perturbations 4 (SGP4) model for LEO object orbit prediction. However, LEO objects are significantly affected by complex time-varying perturbations such as atmospheric drag, causing model prediction errors to grow rapidly over time—short-term errors can reach hundreds to thousands of meters, while medium- and long-term prediction errors may exceed 10 km. Although traditional dynamical models can achieve relatively high accuracy through numerical integration, they incur substantial computational costs and suffer from limited atmospheric density modeling accuracy (only about 5%–15%). Analytical methods, while computationally efficient, struggle to handle complex perturbations. In recent years, bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) networks have demonstrated strong capabilities in time-series prediction; nevertheless, an effective approach for systematically modeling and compensating for TLE-based prediction errors using solely publicly available TLE data has remained lacking.