[Orekit Developers] Ongoing changes in orbit determination

[MAISONOBE Luc <luc.maisonobe@c-s.fr>]

Hi all,


As some of you seem to be using quite a lot orbit determination by now,
I want to notify that I am currently changing some low levels interfaces
that are mainly intended to be used internally. You may have seen
changes in ObservedMeasurement.estimate() and in EstimatedMeasurement
constructor, that in fact will be reverted today. Other changes will
occur in ParameterDriver and ParameterObserver. I try to limit these
changes but cannot preserve upward compatibility throughout (this is
one of the reasons why upcoming version will be another major release).
As these API are mostly for Orekit internal needs, they should not really
hurt end users, but as for technical reasons due to Java visibility
rules some of these APIS are public, you may be affected..

In any case, if some of the changes break your builds, do not hesitate
to notify us. We will try to help you, most probably by guiding you
to update your code as changes introduced are really needed.

For your information, the current changes are intended to allow
estimated parameters to have a reference date, hence enabling
time-dependent parametric models. Last week I tried to do that
by adding a reference to initialState in the measurements, but
it does not really work. I hope to stabilize this very soon.

I apologize for the inconvenience
Luc