Decentralized determination of relative orbit for formation flying satellite

Autonomous formation flying is an important technology for the future space missions involving multiple satellites, and one of the key requirements of formation flying is accurate relative navigation. This paper develops an efficient approach of autonomous relative orbit determination for formation flying satellite. In view of that some formation flying satellites work at the orbits which are beyond the range of a GPS signal, inter-satellite measurements by the devices onboard the satellite instead of GPS measurements are chosen to perform this relative navigation. Several estimator architectures and associated algorithms are presented, among which the decentralized architecture is chosen because it can reduce the computational load as well as the communication requirements among the satellites, accordingly the orbit states estimation is achieved through a decentralized Schmidt-Kalman filter design. The simulation results verify the validity of this navigation method.