Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Constructing a constellation using as few satellites as possible is the main content of the Problem B of the 8th Chinese Trajectory Optimization Competition. This article presents the method and the result (which won the first prize in the competition) of the team from the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In order to establish a low-Earth-orbit constellation that can cover a total of 225 target points on the ground with the revisiting time interval no more than 1 h, we proposed a design method in which the key idea is to place multiple satellites in the same repeated ground-track orbit, and this idea contributes to minimize the number of satellites in the constellation. The process to establish such a constellation consists of three main steps: firstly, constructing the “repeated ground-track orbits vs. target-points” database; secondly, searching for the minimum number of repeated ground-track orbits that can cover all the target points in a repeated ground-track period; thirdly, computing the orbital elements of the required satellites for satisfying the constraint of revisiting time interval less than 1 h. The design result shows that the constellation design method is effective and is expected to extend to be a general method to deal with the problem: constructing a constellation using a minimum number of satellites that covers specified target points on the ground with required revisiting time intervals.
Source: Scientia Sinica Technologica
Authors: Jian MA, YaZhe MENG, XiaoLong ZHU, ShengMao HE, Yang GAO
Language: English
Subfield: Aerospace Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2787205953