Abstract:

 In most cases, the payloads on the elliptical orbit satellites tend to work near the apogee or perigee. The ground point of the apogee/perigee changes slowly under the nature perturbations, hence it is hard to complete the global coverage within the required time. In this paper, a continuous low-thrust method is proposed to control the orbital apsidal motion, so the period of global coverage could be changed artificially. By designing the control strategy and selecting the reasonable truncation order of the parameters, an analytic suboptimal solution is presented. And meanwhile, the altitude of the perigee is protected to ensure the satellite security. The simulation results indicate that the method in this paper is effective to control the global coverage period, and the fuel consumption and control force are in the reasonable ranges.

Key words:  Elliptical orbit, Subastral point；Station keeping；Electric propulsion；Low-thrust control