A Keplerian approach to angles-only orbit determination

A method is derived from Kepler's laws of motion allowing the determination of slant range for orbiting targets given monocular angles-only measurements. The method is shown to work without knowledge of three parameters: universal gravitational constant, mass of the central body, and time scale. Monte Carlo trials with noisy data sets, however, show that the method is much more sensitive to measurement noise than competing methods that require knowledge of these parameters.