• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.315-326
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• 2007

Recently introduced, several explicit solutions of relative motion between neighboring elliptic satellite orbits are reviewed. The performance of these solutions is compared with an analytic solution of the general linearized equation of motion. The inversion solution by the Hill-Clohessy-Wiltshire equations is used to produce the initial condition of numerical results. Despite the difference of the reference orbit, the relative motion with the relatively small eccentricity shows the similar results on elliptic case and circular case. In case of the 'chief' satellite with the relatively large eccentricity, HCW equation with the circular reference orbit has relatively larger error than other elliptic equation of motion does.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.1-8
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• 2003

Satellite formation flying is the placing micro-satellites with the same mission into nearby orbits to form a cluster. Clohessy-Wiltshire equations are used to describe the relative motion and control strategies between satellites within a cluster, which are known as Hill's equations. Even though Hill's equations are powerful in determining initial conditions for the satellite formation flying, they can not accurately express the relative motion under J2 perturbation. Some methods have been developed for the determination of initial conditions to avoid limits of Hill's equation. This paper gives a new method of determining initial conditions using mean elements. For this research mean elements were transformed to osculating elements using Brouwer's theory and the orbit was propaeated with the consideration of J2-J8 to get a relative position. The results show that satellites within a cluster are maintained in the desired boundary for long period and the method is effective on a fuel saving for satellite formation flying.

• Journal of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.357-366
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• 2020

This paper addressed a relative navigation method for autonomous rendezvous and docking of cube-satellites using single frequency Differential GPS (DGPS) under the intermittent communication between satellites. Since the ionospheric error of GPS measurement is variable depending on the visible satellites, a few meters error of relative navigation is occurred in the Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) environment. Therefore, it is essential to remove the ionospheric error to perform relative navigation. Besides, an intermittent communication period for receiving GPS measurements of the target satellite is limited for getting information every sampling time. To solve this problem, a method combining range domain DGPS and orbit propagation is proposed in this paper. The proposed method improves the performance of DGPS by using Hatch filter and solves an intermittent communication problem by estimating the relative position and velocity using Hill-Clohessy-Wiltshire Equation. Through the simulation, it is verified that the suggested algorithm provides the relative position error within RMS 0.5 m and the relative velocity error within RMS 3 cm/s. Furthermore, it has the advantage that it is suitable for real-time implementation using single-frequency GPS measurements and is computationally efficient.