ANALYSIS OF AOCS CONCEPTS FOR COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES IN HIGHLY ECCENTRIC ORBITS

摘要

This paper summarises the work done by SENER under an ESA contract [Ref. 1] whose main objective was to investigate an AOCS subsystem optimisation for communications satellites flying in HEO orbits (8H, 12H, 16H, 24H) while remaining compatible with a GEO mission. The aim was to identify AOCS design concepts with the best performance to cost ratio and commonality for the different orbits. A complete analysis of the AOCS subsystem has been performed, including different operating orbits (Molniya, Tundra, M-HEO 8 and 16 hours), different strategies for orbit acquisition, and several stabilisation/pointing concepts: dual spin and three axis stabilised in combination with some Nadir, Sun and North-South pointing configurations. As main output from this study, some conclusions on the preferred AOCS configurations to be used in HEO missions are presented. The MHEO-8H mission with a Nadir pointing three-axis stabilisation option was selected as the most promising concept (although some other configurations could also be interesting) and, therefore, it was analysed in a detailed way through several simulations.