A rapid coverage analysis approach of reentry vehicles networking constellation based on predicted distance

Abstract

To address the problems of low-precision and time-consuming coverage analysis of Reentry Vehicles Networking Constellation (RVNC), this paper proposes a rapid coverage analysis approach consisting of a coverage model of RVNC and a coverage analysis algorithm. In this approach, we first establish the coverage model of RVNC to obtain a coverage criterion used to judge whether a satellite can cover a target. Then, Predictive Distance Tracking Algorithm (PDTA) is proposed to quickly calculate RVNC coverage performances. The PDTA can adaptively adjust the time tracking step by predicting the distance between a target and a coverage area. Finally, the proposed approach is verified by computational experiments. The results show that the proposed approach is rapid, intuitive, and accurate, which makes it be suitable for RVNC and has wide application prospects.