Performance Enhancement of a Satellite’s Onboard Antenna Tracking Profile using the Ground Station Searching Method

In satellite operations, stable maneuvering of a satellite’s onboard antenna to prevent undesirable vibrations to the satellite body is required for high-quality high-resolution images. For this reason, the onboard antenna’s angular rate is typically minimized while still satisfying the system requirement that limits the speed of the onboard antenna. In this study, a simple yet effective method, called the ground station searching method, is proposed to reduce the angular rate of a satellite’s onboard antenna. The performance of the proposed method is tested using real flight data from the KOMPSAT-3 satellite. Approximately 83% of arbitrarily selected real flight scenarios from 66 test cases show reductions in the onboard antenna’s azimuth angular rates. Additionally, reliable solutions were consistently obtained within a reasonably acceptable computation time while generating an onboard antenna tracking profile. The obtained results indicate that the proposed method can be used in real satellite operations and can reduce the operational loads on a ground operator. Although the current work only considers the KOMPSAT-3 satellite as a test case, the proposed method can be easily modified and applied to other satellites that have similar operational characteristics.