What is the need of station keeping?
Orbital station-keeping, manoeuvres used to keep a spacecraft in an assigned orbit. Nautical stationkeeping, maintaining a seagoing vessel in a position relative to other vessels or a fixed point.
How often is station keeping planned and carried out on a satellite?
Satellites have a supply of fuel allocated for station keeping and this fuel is used gradually over a planned lifetime period of 7 to 15 years to keep the satellite within typically +/- 0.15 deg east west and +/-0.15 deg north/south of its nominal orbit position.
What do you mean by North South station keeping maneuver?
Maneuvers to reduce inclination and maintain it near Page 2 zero are known as North-South station keeping and can often be the largest contributor to GEO satellite propellant usage. Satellite longitude at GEO is primarily affected by obliquity of earth’s equator as well as solar radiation pressure.
Why station keeping consumes more fuel?
This approach is based on the integral over the time of the perturbing forces. In this sense, this integral can be seen as a criterion to select the orbit of the spacecraft. When this value becomes larger, more consumption of fuel is required for the station keeping, and, in this sense, less interesting is the orbit.
How many lines of code are needed to run the ISS?
More than 3 million lines of software code on the ground support more than 1.5 million lines of flight software code.
How do you maintain orbits?
A satellite maintains its orbit by balancing two factors: its velocity (the speed it takes to travel in a straight line) and the gravitational pull that Earth has on it. A satellite orbiting closer to the Earth requires more velocity to resist the stronger gravitational pull.
How do you launch a satellite?
All satellites are launched to space and into their orbit by hitching a ride on a rocket or on the Space Shuttle, where they are placed inside the cargo bay. There are also countries and large corporations that have their own rocket launch facilities, so they can easily send their own satellites into orbit.
What happens after the execution of the station-keeping control?
After the execution of station-keeping control, the spacecraft evaluates the control effect according to the result of autonomous navigation. If the current states meet the requirements of station-keeping control, then the task is completed. Otherwise the remedial measures are taken or execution will be repeated from (1).
What is station-keeping control in space?
The station-keeping control, which performs a series of orbital correction control by the propulsion system in the life time [8], is an important aspect of orbital control for spacecraft, formation flying satellites or space elevator to avoid the conflict with other spacecraft [9], [10], [11], [12].
What are the station keeping capabilities of a vessel?
The vessel’s station keeping capabilities should be clearly understood; both with respect to the intact vessel condition, and for redundant DP vessels even more important also in case the vessels capability should be degraded during operations. E.g. due to relevant failures associated with the vessels dynamic positioning class notation.
What is GEO station-keeping control?
It can guarantee the spacecraft kept with certain west-east position keeping range along with mean longitude control. As is discussed before, the scheme of GEO station-keeping control includes inclination vector i control, mean longitude λ control and eccentricity vector e control.