Fuel-equalized satellite formation reconfiguration technique

During the process of satellite formation reconfiguration, it is important to make each satellite fuel consumption equalized while the total fuel consumption of all satellites are as little as possible, thus increasing the life time of the formation effectively. A new method of the satellite formation reconfiguration is proposed based on the virtual reference center to be changeable. In this method, the virtual center of the formation is considered to be an optimized variable, double impulse programming method is adopted as the single satellite orbit maneuver strategy that acting times of two impulses can be optimized, and the problem of formation reconfiguration is transformed into a mixed 0-1 mathematic programming problem. Simulation results manifest that while the total fuel consumption of the formation is suboptimal, the new method can make each satellite fuel consumption equalized in consideration of the present residual fuel of each satellite.