Station keeping of constellations using multiobjective strategies

Abstract

The goal of the present paper is to study the problem of station keeping maneuvers of satellites that belong to a constellation. The objective is to perform those maneuvers with low fuel consumption and but also including a time constraint. This type of problem has several aspects to be considered, like fuel consumption, duration of themaneuvers.These aspects are applied to all the satellites of the constellation, so a strategy has to be found to consider the global optimization of those variables that can control the geometry of the constellation. So, this is a multiobjective problem. To find a solution, strategies are formulated that minimize the fuel consumption considering all the satellites and also considering the duration of the maneuver. Numerical examples are shown. Copyright © 2013 Evandro Marconi Rocco et al.