The Mutual Interactions between Drag Make-up and MeanLocal Time Maneuver Designs

摘要

The maintenance of repeat-groundtrack, sun-synchronous satellites is generally thought of as falling into two activities: 1) maintaining the groundtrack and 2) maintaining the Mean Local Time of Ascending Node (MLTAN). This paper will discuss how these design activities need to be combined in the particular case when the frequencies of Drag Make-Up (DMU) maneuvers and the Inclination Adjust Maneuvers (IAM) used to control the MLTAN are comparable. Potential applications of this theory include two upcoming missions: the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) and the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP, where NPOESS stands for National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System). The results can be summarized by saying that the DMU maneuver magnitude is a function of where in the MLTAN cycle it is performed with special consideration when an IAM will be performed before the next DMU.