Autonomous determination of relative orbit for multi-satellite formation

Autonomous orbit determination for satellite formation flight is of great importance. The objective of this paper is to estimate the relative orbits for the multi-satellite formation, an approach of decentralized filter on the basis of augmenting the measurements between slave satellites is developed. The orbit states estimation was achieved through a two-level Kalman filter design, the first-level filter estimated the local states, and the precision of those estimations was enhanced in the second-level filter with the help of the measurements between slave satellites. The numerical simulation results verify the validity of this navigation approach.