Guidance, navigation and attitude control of mini-satellites in a low earth orbit constellation for areal survey

Abstract

The problems of guidance, navigation and attitude control in a constellation of mini-observation satellites are considered. The developed methods and algorithms for scanning areal survey performed by these constellations in the low sun-synchronous orbits are presented. The most important new results are methods for coordinated angular guidance of satellites in the constellation’s orbital planes and the comparison results for sequences of the areal space surveys.