Reduction and reconstruction strategy of active thermal control system based on unsupervised learning and thermo-optics for spaceborne high-resolution remote sensor

Abstract

The development of small Earth observation satellites with high performance optical remote sensors has received much attention in recent years due to its responsiveness and immediacy. As one of the most resource-intensive subsystems of spacecrafts, the active thermal control system (ATCS) should be optimized; however, manual thermal design does not guarantee an optimal solution and requires months. For this purpose, we presented a ATCS’s reduction and reconstruction strategy based on an unsupervised learning framework, in which factor loadings are applied to combine kernel-based principal component analysis and Gaussian mixture model clustering. This strategy was implemented on a spaceborne high-resolution remote sensor (HRS) with 0.5 m ground sample distance. As a result, with the cumulative variance contribution rate > 90 % and 10 Gaussian distributions, the reconstructed ATCS of HRS had a 78.6 % reduction rate and took only 3 h, which suggests the high efficiency and low computational cost of the proposed strategy. Finally, the performed orbital thermal and thermo-optical integrated analyses indicated that temperature fluctuations were within ± 0.02–0.6 °C and optical surface errors were within the tolerance. The average modulation transfer function in the tangential and sagittal directions decreased by only 2 % and 2.5 %, respectively, and the radius of the spot root mean square was considerably smaller than the size of one pixel (8.75 μm). These results prove the feasibility and validity of the proposed strategy. This study solved the problem of identifying the optimal ATCS for optical remote sensors and significantly reducing the ATCS’s resource occupancy, which provided a reliable research basis for the development of high-performance small Earth observation satellites. Additionally, the proposed strategy is versatile and can be used in thermal engineering applications of various complex spacecrafts and payloads.