Constellation design for responsive revisiting

XU, Ming and McInnes, Colin (2012) Constellation design for responsive revisiting. In: 1st IAA Conference on Dynamics and Control of Space Systems, 2012-03-19 - 2012-03-21.

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Abstract

Responsive communications or Earth observation missions typically require frequent revisit to any point of the Earth’s surface and employ a constellation with two satellites to improve coverage performance. As a new approach to constellation design, a novel constellation is presented by fixing the interval between successive revisits at all latitudes. Analytic and numerical simulations are implemented to illustrate that such a revisiting constellation exists in a large region parameterized by the relative values of right ascension of ascending node and argument of latitude. A global investigation is presented to address the practical time-resolution of the constellation and its topological shape, the existence region, and the relationship to the semi-major axis and inclination.