A new approach to on-board stationkeeping of GEO-satellites

Abstract

This paper proposes a new autonomous stationkeeping system suitable for geostationary satellite operation and presents the results of the computer simulations conducted to verify the proposed system. The proposed on-board stationkeeping system receives pseudo-range signal from the ground equipments located at two different positions with a long baseline, determines the orbit error in real-time, and generates the orbit control command. To minimize the complexity of the on-board stationkeeping logic and to improve reliability, a simple orbit controller has been designed, which generates a series of control signal making the orbit roughly follow the predetermined reference range data. The reference range data are assumed to be generated through a ground based computer simulation and embedded or uploaded with time tag. Finally, the performance of the proposed system has been verified through computer simulations. (C) 2005 Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.