Normalizing In-Orbit Anomalies and Retaining Stability Using Preferential-EKF for Autonomous Small Satellite Constellations in CisLunar Space

As the CisLunar economy takes its pace towards growing competence and demanding solutions, the need for enhanced methodologies to systematically upgrade performance and sustainability is inevitable. Small Satellites have been a major portion of this CisLunar region ever since the Moon missions using CubeSats started engaged the space industry towards real problems and created a wave of extended scope for research in this domain. This paper will present the essential novel methodology to address the issue of in-orbit anomalies of the small satellite constellations to be solved autonomously for the lifetime of their mission. The technique uses the Kalman filter with an addition of the ‘preferential autonomous logic’ to choose solutions in orbit as the anomalies occur. As the small satellites are distributed across a coverage over Earth, the synchronization with all the satellites in the same or different plane is by far the most challenging aspect of managing a constellation. With small satellites, the scenario is even more complicated and sensitive to handle. Hence, with this paper, the technique of preferential-Kalman filtering in each plane is introduced with extensive research on literature and analysis followed by discussions on the achieved results and the conclusions.