A Self-Supervised Framework for Space Object Behaviour Characterisation

Foundation Models, which leverage large neural networks pre-trained on unlabelled data before fine-tuning for specific tasks, are increasingly being applied to specialised domains. Recent examples include ClimaX for climate and Clay for satellite Earth observation, but a Foundation Model for Space Object Behavioural Analysis has not yet been developed. As orbital populations grow, automated methods for characterising space object behaviour are crucial for space safety. Here, we present a Space Safety and Sustainability Foundation Model focusing on space object behavioural analysis using light curves. To build our Foundation Model, we implemented a Perceiver-V ariational Autoencoder (V AE) architecture, pre-trained with self-supervised reconstruction and masked reconstruction on 227,000 light curves from the MMT -9 observatory. The V AE enables anomaly detection, space object motion prediction, and generation of synthetic light curves. Our pre-trained model achieved a reconstruction mean squared error of 0.009, identifying potentially anomalous light curves through reconstruction di fficulty. After fine-tuning, the model scored 88% and 82% accuracy, with 0.90 and 0.95 ROC AUC scores respectively in both anomaly detection and motion mode prediction (e.g., sun-pointing, spin, tumbling etc.). Analysis of high-confidence anomaly predictions on real data revealed distinct patterns including characteristic object profiles and satellite glinting. The motion mode prediction model successfully di fferentiated between various movement behaviours such as sun-pointing, spin, and tumbling. Our work demonstrates how self-supervised learning can simultaneously enable anomaly detection, motion prediction, and synthetic data generation from rich representations learned in pre-training. More broadly, our work supports space safety and sustainability through automated monitoring and simulation capabilities. The number of objects launched is growing rapidly, with 159 worldwide launches in 2000 versus 2849 in 2024 [1].