A new approach to on-board stationkeeping of GEO-satellites

This paper proposes a new autonomous stationkeeping system suitable for geostationary satellite operation and presents the results of the computer simulations conducted to verify the proposed system. The proposed on-board stationkeeping system receives pseudo-range signal from the ground equipments located at two different positions with a long baseline, determines the orbit error in real-time, and generates the orbit control command. To minimize the complexity of the on-board stationkeeping logic and to improve reliability, a simple orbit controller has been designed, which generates a series of control signal making the orbit roughly follow the predetermined reference range data. The reference range data are assumed to be generated through a ground based computer simulation and embedded or uploaded with time tag. Finally, the performance of the proposed system has been verified through computer simulations.