A new inclination control strategy was developed for the maneuver planning of satellites using Arc-jet thrusters. Orbital motion of geostationary telecommunication satellites is perturbed by the earth's geopotential field, solar radiation pressure and the gravitational attraction of the sun and moon. The latter in particular, contributes strongly to perturb the orbital inclination of the satellites. Frequent inclination maneuvers must be performed in order to keep the orbital inclination to within a limit for telecommunication requirements. These maneuvers consume a large amount of propellant due to the large delta velocity corrections. The INTELSAT VIII satellites are equipped with Arc-jets to improve performance during the inclination maneuvers. The trade off is that they require a large amount of electrical energy to operate and the resulting thrust is relatively low. Because of the low thrust of the Arc-jets, long maneuver duration is necessary to achieve the required delta velocity. To ensure safety of the satellites, INTELSAT imposes a limit on the maneuver duration due to thermal and power constraints on the hardware.
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