Satellite cumulative earth coverage
Abstract
Earth coverage analysis may be divided into two categories, including instantaneous coverage and cumulative coverage. A difficulty of cumulative coverage is that the earth regions being viewed are changing as the satellites move in their orbits. The considered investigation is concerned with a new approach, the meridian technique. The new technique models the earth as a series of meridians, or bands of longitude. This technique determines the exact latitude intervals that are viewed at each time step. This procedure eliminates the errors in the traditional technique caused by the points having discrete values of latitude. Because of this, the accuracy is dependent only on the number of meridians chosen and the time step used to compute instantaneous coverage. This makes the meridian technique considerably more accurate and much more computationally efficient than the traditional approach.
- Publication:
-
AIAA, Astrodynamics Specialist Conference
- Pub Date:
- August 1981
- Bibcode:
- 1981aiaa.confR....C
- Keywords:
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- Longitude;
- Satellite Networks;
- Spacecraft Communication;
- Accuracy;
- Crosslinking;
- Error Analysis;
- Ground Stations;
- Astrodynamics