Comparison of non-intrusive approaches to uncertainty propagation in orbital mechanics

The paper presents four different non-intrusive approaches to the propagation of uncertainty in orbital dynamics with particular application to space debris orbit analysis. Intrusive approaches are generally understood as those methods that require a modification of the original problem by introducing a new algebra or by directly embedding high-order polynomial expansions of the uncertain quantities in the governing equations. Non-intrusive approaches are instead based on a polynomial representations built on sparse samples of the system response to the uncertain quantities. The paper will present a standard Polynomial Chaos Expansion, an Uncertain Quantification-High Dimensional Model Representation, a Generalised Kriging model and an expansion with Tchebycheff polynomials on sparse grids. The work will assess the computational cost and the suitability of these methods to propagate different type of orbits.