Abstract: For orbit determination of space targets in the low earth orbit, a kind of precise orbit determination method is proposed based on the cubature Kalman filter. Compared with widely used extended Kalman filter, the proposed method provides more accurate state estimation. Moreover, due to the rigorous mathematical proof of the cubature Kalman filter, it achieves good performance on the numerical stability with the complicated motion model during orbit determination. Then, by introducing the sequential posterior Cramér-Rao lower bound, the effect of different radar observation models on the orbit determination performance is analyzed. Finally, using the simulated observation data, the effectiveness of the proposed method and the correctness of the analysis are demonstrated.