A New Constellation Architecture for Practical Responsive Revisiting

Abstract

Responsive communications or Earth surveillance missions typically require frequent revisits to any point on the Earth's surface and employ a constellation with two satellites to improve coverage performance. As a new approach to constellation design, in this paper, a novel constellation is presented by fixing the interval between successive revisits at all latitudes. Analytic and numerical simulations are implemented to illustrate the existence of such a revisiting constellation in a large region parameterized by the relative values of right ascension of ascending node and argument of latitude. We also present a global investigation to address the existence region of the PTR constellation, associated with the relationship between the characteristic parameters and the orbital elements (for example, semi-major axis and inclination). In order to design the stationkeeping strategy for PTR constellation, a new concept of J 2 invariant PTR constellation is introduced. Compared to a single-burn strategy tracking a specified PTR constellation, the improved strategy has a clear competitive advantage of reducing the control frequencies or costs down to one fifth.