Ground track maintenance for BeiDou IGSO satellites subject to tesseral resonances and the luni-solar perturbations

Eight inclined geosynchronous satellite orbit (IGSO) satellites in the Chinese BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) have been put in orbit until now. IGSO is a special class of geosynchronous circular orbit, with the inclination not equal to zero. It can provide high elevation angle coverage to high-latitude areas. The geography longitude of the ground track cross node is the main factor to affect the ground coverage areas of the IGSO satellites. In order to ensure the navigation performance of the IGSO satellites, the maintenance control of the ground track cross node is required. Considering the tesseral resonances and the luni-solar perturbations, a control approach is proposed to maintain the ground track for the long-term evolution. The drifts of the ground track cross node of the IGSO satellites are analyzed, which is formulated as a function of the bias of the orbit elements and time. Based on the derived function, a method by offsetting the semi-major axis is put forward to maintain the longitude of the ground track cross node, and the offset calculation equation is presented as well. Moreover, the orbit inclination is adjusted to maintain the location angle intervals between each two IGSO satellites. Finally, the precision of the offset calculation equation is analyzed to achieve the operational deployment. Simulation results show that the semi-major axis offset method is effective, and its calculation equation is accurate. The proposed approach has been applied to the maintenance control of BeiDou IGSO satellites.