Rapid Satellite-to-Site Visibility Determination Based on Self-Adaptive Interpolation Technique

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-adaptive Hermite interpolation method that significantly accelerates satellite-to-site visibility calculations, achieving up to 98% faster results than traditional brute force approaches.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel self-adaptive interpolation technique using piecewise cubic curves and an interval shrinking strategy for rapid visibility determination.

Findings

Achieves 98% reduction in computation time.

Applicable to all orbital types and orbit propagators.

Provides analytical rise and set times from cubic polynomial roots.

Abstract

Rapid satellite-to-site visibility determination is of great significance to coverage analysis of satellite constellations as well as onboard mission planning of autonomous spacecraft. This paper presents a novel self-adaptive Hermite interpolation technique for rapid satellite-to-site visibility determination. Piecewise cubic curves are utilized to approximate the waveform of the visibility function versus time. The fourth-order derivative is used to control the approximation error and to optimize the time step for interpolation. The rise and set times are analytically obtained from the roots of cubic polynomials. To further increase the computational speed, an interval shrinking strategy is adopted via investigating the geometric relationship between the ground viewing cone and the orbit trajectory. Simulation results show a 98% decrease in computation time over the brute force method. The method is suitable for all orbital types and analytical orbit propagators.