Student Research Spotlight
Surabhi Bhadauria
Department:Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering
Advisor:Dr. Carolin Frueh
Research Title:Astrodynamics and Space Applications/Orbit Determination using single set of observations
Research Description:
For most space objects (SOs), we have an abundant dataset of angle and angle-rate measurements. In principle, if the motion of the observing station is known and if both the angle and angle-rate measurements of a satellite at two times are known, then candidate orbit solutions may be obtained. But how do we correlate that the measurements are obtained at both times to the same orbit? My research focuses on correlating angle and angle-rate measurements at two different times. I start with creating a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) for an admissible region which contains all the possible orbits for one set of measurements. The mean and covariance associated with this GMM are propagated to a second time using Extended Kalman Filter. Once we have the truth and propagated GMM at the second time, I use the concept of Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence to find the overlap between them. We expect to get less KL divergence value for measurements of the same object as compared to the KL divergence between measurements of different objects.
Why CIGP?
I decided to join Computational Interdisciplinary graduate Program to learn more about numerical methods. Numerical methods are commonly used in the field of astrodynamics and being in CIGP has helped me advance my research.
Awards:
- Prime Minister's Scholarship (on the basis of academic merit), Ministry of Defense, India
- Institute Color (highest honor given for exceptional work in co-curricular activities), PEC University of Technology
Publications:
- V. Dubey, S. Bhadauria and V. Kain: "Effect of dissolved oxygen on corrosion behavior of carbon steel in simulated reactor environment". 17th Asian Pacific Corrosion Conference, January 2016.
Leadership:
- Event Coordinator, Asha for Education, Purdue Chapter
- Program Assistant. Minority Engineering Program Summer workshop, Purdue University
- Instructor, Gifted Education Research Institute, Purdue University
- General Secretary, Art and Photography Club, PEC University of Technology, India
- Creative Head, PECFEST'15, PEC University of Technology, India
