Constellation design for responsive revisiting

Responsive communications or Earth observation missions typically require frequent revisit to any point of the Earth’s surface and employ a constellation with two satellites to improve coverage performance. As a new approach to constellation design, a novel constellation is presented by fixing the interval between successive revisits at all latitudes. Analytic and numerical simulations are implemented to illustrate that such a revisiting constellation exists in a large region parameterized by the relative values of right ascension of ascending node and argument of latitude. A global investigation is presented to address the practical time-resolution of the constellation and its topological shape, the existence region, and the relationship to the semi-major axis and inclination