INITIAL DEPLOYMENT AND NEAR OPTIMAL CONTROL FOR MAINTAINING CONSTANT DISTANCE BETWEEN SATELLITES IN AN ELLIPTICALLY ORBITING CONSTELLATION

摘要

In the Auroral Cluster Observation System proposed by NASA for scientific data collection, the constellation with a constant separation between adjacent satellites in an elliptical orbit is required. The technique for maintaining separation error within +-0.45% between satellites in Keplerian orbit was developed in a previous paper. One task of this paper is to discuss the initial deployment (the method to distribute the satellites packed together in a launch vehicle to the constellation positions from the transient orbit), and a near optimal control strategy for this time-varying and non-linear system to eliminate the remaining errors from the initial deployment and compensate the effects from various perturbations.