Abstract
Spent rocket bodies in geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) pose impact risks to the Earth's surface when they re-enter the Earth's at- mosphere. To mitigate these risks, re-entry prediction of GTO rocket bodies is required. In this paper, the re-entry prediction of rocket bod- ies in eccentric orbits based on only Two-Line Element (TLE) data and using only ballistic coefficient (BC) estimation is assessed. The TLEs are preprocessed to filter out outliers and the BC is estimated using only semi-major axis data. The BC estimation and re-entry pre- diction accuracy are analyzed by performing predictions for 101 rocket bodies initially in GTO and comparing with the actual re-entry epoch at different times before re-entry. Predictions using a single and mul- tiple BC estimates and using state estimation by orbit determination are quantitatively compared with each other for the 101 upper stages.