Quasi-satellite system for leader-follower spacecraft formation

• Main Author: Mohd Harithuddin, Ahmad Salahuddin
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Physics Publishing 2016
• Online Access: http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/53717/1/Quasi-satellite%20system%20for%20leader-follower%20spacecraft.pdf; http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/53717/; http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/152/1/012034/meta

The quasi-satellite motion is where a celestial body appears to orbit around another body that is also orbiting a common focus. The recent discoveries of asteroids in quasi-satellite motion around the Earth inspired this work. This paper attempts to look into exploiting the quasi-satellite dynamics in nature to provide a new perspective in spacecraft formation flight. We consider a two-spacecraft formation flight in which the follower appears to orbit of the leader in its reference frame. We perform a parametric analysis by varying the orbital elements of leader and follower examine the initial conditions needed to simulate a quasi-satellite formation system. We illustrate the trajectories of the follower spacecraft. This serves two purposes: firstly, to demonstrate formation flight based on the idea of quasi-satellite; and secondly, to gain some insights on the shapes of the resultant "quasi-orbits".