Natural formation designof nano/micro spacecraft cluster subject to typical tasks

The study of distributed remote sensing attracts much attention in the development of space exploration. The key issue towards this field is to study the system property of spacecraft cluster composed of multiple nano/micro modules. In addition, the formation of multiple nano/micro spacecraft is maintained and rebuilt for different application tasks. Due to the fact that micro/nano spacecraft is often lack of fuel, to maintain the stability of distributed remote sensing formation of nano/micro spacecraft for a relatively long period of time under the natural formation is very important. In this paper, a direct parameter method is proposed under the tree communication topology constraints for collaborative observation mode of distributed remote sensing spacecraft cluster. The orbit parameters of the N followers are obtained directly by this method. This paper also establishes a natural evolution model of spacecraft cluster with the advantages of simplicity, intuition and clear physical meaning. According to the assignment of national key research and development plan “distributed reconfigurable remote sensing technology based on nano/micro spacecraft”, we verify the correctness of the proposed method using the pre-given orbit parameters. Also, the numerical simulations of the formation flying are performed through STK and the simulation results show that the proposed approach has the advantages of easy implementation, high precision and robustness.