Collision Avoidance Engineering Design for Satellite Formation Flying

Due to the operational requirements and the space perturbation, the formation satellites need to be controlled more frequently than a single larger satellite. To avoid catastrophic consequences to the mission, formation security should be particularly considered. Since the space operation center has been monitoring foreign objects close proximity the formation, the collision avoidance engineering design for inter-satellite security is discussed in the paper. Combined with typical formation control cases, collision avoidance strategy will be detailed. In order to verify the proposed method practical, simulation examples are constructed with the state parameters coming from the TanDEM-X mission. Simulation results show the method is effective and practical.