Autonomous Station Keeping of Satellites in Areostationary Mars Orbit: A Predictive Control Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a model predictive control strategy for maintaining satellites in areostationary orbit around Mars, effectively reducing fuel consumption by accounting for non-Keplerian perturbations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel predictive control approach that exploits perturbation knowledge for efficient station-keeping of Martian satellites.

Findings

Reduced annual station-keeping Δv compared to naive designs

Effective application at various longitudes, including potential landing sites

Simulation results demonstrate improved fuel efficiency

Abstract

The continued exploration of Mars will require a greater number of in-space assets to aid interplanetary communications. Future missions to the surface of Mars may be augmented with stationary satellites that remain overhead at all times as a means of sending data back to Earth from fixed antennae on the surface. These areostationary satellites will experience several important disturbances that push and pull the spacecraft off of its desired orbit. Thus, a station-keeping control strategy must be put into place to ensure the satellite remains overhead while minimizing the fuel required to elongate mission lifetime. This paper develops a model predictive control policy for areostationary station keeping that exploits knowledge of non-Keplerian perturbations in order to minimize the required annual station-keeping $\Delta v$. The station-keeping policy is applied to a satellite placed at various longitudes, and simulations are performed for an example mission at a longitude of a potential future crewed landing site. Through careful tuning of the controller constraints, and proper placement of the satellite at stable longitudes, the annual station-keeping $\Delta v$ can be reduced relative to a naive mission design.